Nature's Way of Loving You

For the last three months, I’ve been immersed in the process of creating color with natural dyes. This experience has felt fundamentally different from all my years of simply using color as part of my artmaking.

Somehow, being a part of the birthing process of well over a 100 colors has made me feel more deeply connected to the mysterious abstraction that is color.

I see now that color is a fundamental truth of the infinite matrix of the universe like…math. We can access it and partner with it in conscious ways to create this or that. Or we can simply marvel at it.

Color is not a means to an end. It’s an end in itself.

It’s strange and wonderful how color also serves as a channel of joy for so many of us humans. Color’s effect on most people is immediate and powerful. We all recognize that, but really—what IS that all about? Why does color affect us so deeply?

Perhaps color is an expression of an unconditional love emanating out of the nature of existence—calling us into the everything and saying, “You belong. You belong.”

Kicking it Old School

Completely immersing myself in learning how to create color with plants, insects, minerals and metal has been a truly intimate experience.

And throughout, I kept marveling at the gentleness of the process. Creating color with natural dyes feels very different from my experiences using synthetic dyes. While synthetic dyes offer consistency and reliability, they have less nuance and depth than dyes created from plants and insects.

It was also fascinating to learn how much we can almost endlessly extend and expand our palettes—by changing dye ratios yes, but also by shifting the colors with quick visits into indigo and diluted iron baths.

In the parlance of natural dyeing, iron often “saddens” a color which often results in beautiful muted tones or deeper values than can be achieved just with the dye alone. For instance, myrobalan (a nut) dyes fabric a kind of buttery yellow. But a dip in an iron bath afterward creates a beautiful grey, and a quick dip in indigo will create a lovely teal.

After dyeing a swatch of silk in myrobalan, I tore it into 3 pieces. The top yellow piece is the original. The middle piece was put into an iron bath to create that grey and the bottom one was dipped in an indigo bath. I did this with every color.

And exhausted dyed baths (that is, dye baths that have already been used but still have some residual color left) can produce colors that still look pretty rich. For instance, all the hankies in that silver bowl in the video (and below) were made using exhausted dye baths.

All these hankies were dyed in ‘exhausted dye baths” (except the blue which was dipped for one minute in an indigo bath). Such a lovely range of colors.

But the subtlety goes on. This range of very delicate pinky-browns to pale yellows and greens below was created from exhaust baths of exhaust baths of exhaust baths. The pinkish ones remind me of the colors old terra cotta pots—very vintage and soft.

Dye until you can dye no more.

I find the whole experience extremely old school and romantic.

You can see how each swatch of fabric gets a label so I can track my work. This will be invaluable for making a sample book.

My last step is to make myself a reference book of swatches. A portable library! I can’t tell you how excited I am to make that. I’ve already bought myself a special blank book.

The Opposite of Dabbling

This project has been one of the most gratifying creative explorations I’ve done in a long while. It’s wild to me to have created a foundational library of color for myself—my own personal launchpad into a new series of work.

(If you want to do this too, you can sign up for the same online class I just finished.)

And the record keeping part of this experience—tagging every sample, and documenting each step of my progress with photos—has been a huge part of the value of this class because it enabled me to genuinely internalize the information. So much self-paced online learning often feels superficial—a glossing over—but committing to complete every step in this class has been a real gift to myself.

And because I’m obsessed, now I’m learning how to make my own ink. (There’s so much overlap in materials; how could I resist?) I’ll keep you posted.

I also created the video at the top of this post about it—making that felt like an art project itself! I’d love it if you’d give it a watch and let me know what you think.

In the meantime, do you respond strongly to certain colors or color relationships? What do you think about the mystery of color and why it affects us so much? Please leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you.