The marks a fabric brush makes
What happens when brush, paper, water, plate, and color all gather together. Sometimes it’s the entire creative process that becomes the most interesting thing.
The first handmade brush I made (affectionately called brush #1) used natural strips of handwoven PhuTai cotton fabric and Tai Lue thread from Laos, and a found stick from my many hikes. It looks like a flower to me, the six strips of fabric reaching up, the ‘petals’ floppy and fraying, held at the nape by a wrap of handspun thread. You can read more about the making of this and other brushes in a previous post here: Making brushes.
I usually work in black – ink, gouache, litho crayons, charcoal. But then my friend Sush suggested a blue color she had that was like indigo and wouldn’t that be cool. It was food coloring blue, the ones that come in those tiny teardrop shaped bottles! She dropped one off on her way home.
What marks would it make? I envisioned interesting wide lines and streaks. Of course it was more surprising than that, as brushes envision their own marks, too.
So many different things come together in mark making – the mood of everything, really. What’s my mood and how does my hand hold the brush? What does the brush want and what is her mood? The texture of the paper affects the dance on the stage, too. So does the blue color and the water and what they want to sing. We’re all in this spontaneous play, an improv even, each having to know our own rhythm and tap into the movement of all the others, too.
I watched as the blue color saturated the natural fabric, then moved up to the cotton thread, then up the stick itself. That’s what natural indigo dye does! It travels deep into the crevices of cotton fibers, into the long looping hank of thread, inside and outside the ceramic dye pot itself, and on the fingers and nails of natural dyers.
Which then got me thinking about the next time I’m able to go to Laos. What if I were to make fabric brushes there, use real natural indigo as the ink, and make marks on handmade paper that I make there, too! Oh, the ideas, the ideas.
Sometimes it’s the entire creative process that’s the most interesting thing, not just the final outcome. What happened to the brush, the paper, the plate, the water, the blue color – they were all part of the movement, too.
“The marks a fabric brush makes” was originally published as an exclusive post to my Patreon supporters in June 2021. Now it’s public and available to you, too!
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