The yard and garden are overflowing with possible eco dying fodder right now. And it's a good thing, because I needed lots of material to conduct my Jackson Pollock experiment.
Up until now, I have tried to place the plant material in some kind of arrangement, picking and choosing what to put with what and thinking [if even minimally] about what plants might look interesting on the same page. But over the whole time that I have been doing this, there was one particular result that I loved the most... and that was the chaotic, multilayered, random effect. These often happened by accident so it took me a while to figure out what I needed to do.
I determined to throw this and that onto the papers as freely as my first born, control freak nature would allow. I am very happy with the results. Though I must tell you.... trying to get a proper photograph that represents the actual papers is quite difficult. I tried to adjust them with the settings available to me, so as not to misrepresent them to you. I feel very sensitive about this. Anyway... here are a few of my favorites out of a batch of thirty five:
I like to count the layers or number of planes in these prints. I think the above one has six or seven.
The above image is subtly hiding a magical little feature. There was a tendril from the scarlet runner bean plant tightly wound around the stem of the leaf...
In the lower left corner is a white clover blossom, which I am very fond of too....
The above may be my favorite print of the whole batch. I think I can count eight planes in it.
I took two different photos of the following paper, one indoors and one outdoors to show the radical difference the lighting makes and illustrating my dilemma in getting a fair representation of this subtle print:
Neither one captures what my eyes see. As a matter of fact, [because I think about these things all the time] photography is ... or can be... so very deceptive. Propagandists have known this ever since the process was invented. And poor schlepps such as myself feel guilt knowing that, even though these papers are awe inspiring in person, they are not quite what I share here on the interwebs. For this I am truly sorry.
But I am not sorry I made this experiment! I will be trying it all over again in the next batch. Though doing one takes up just about the entire day from start to finish. I'm going to need some time to recover from the intensity of this process. [My friend C. knows what I'm talking about ...] :-)
