Okay, so the many many dyes could use some organizing. But YAY! Day 3 is color!

As you can see, I use Tinfix dyes that are French, made my Sennelier in Paris. Of course, there are the stories about how the Russians held all these secrets about dye color that were held tightly behind the Iron Curtain – remember that time (or were you not even alive…)? But then the French, once they got ahold of them, have made the most intense colors ever since. Sadly, the demand has decreased in the last 10 years, so the selection is far smaller. Always with dyes, though, I should be able to mix them to get what I want.

For this particular project, I am just going for broad sweeps of color. So, I am dyeing many frames of silk, one after the other:

I’m composing a piece that might suggest landscape, but it also is so large that the viewer will be walking from one end to the other more often that standing to take in the whole image. In my mind it is closer to Asian than European in that respect: the European art has perspective. But that’s not true of Asian art. I feel so confirmed by David Hockney:

Renaissance European perspective has a vanishing point, but it does not exist in Japanese and Chinese painting. And a view from sitting still, from a stationery point, is not the way you usually see landscape: you are always moving through it. If you put a vanishing point anywhere it means you’ve stopped. In a way, you’re hardly there.