Happy Solstice ☼
How are you relating to the seasonal shift? For me, the Summer Solstice is so significant. For one, it’s when I birthed a human. 10 years ago exactly, I started having contractions which would then result in the emergence of a wonderful person. Henry is a gift of Summer to the world, best described as a rainbow or a sun beam. I am so lucky.
It is also a transitional time when the days go from getting longer (where I am) to getting shorter. Just like that. Is there an exact moment? There is. It’s 4:51 PM EDT. I plan on taking that moment to pause and be silent. It feels like such an important moment.
This particular Solstice is when one thing for me is ending and another is beginning in my art practice. What is ending is a 6 month in-depth course I have been taking on natural pigments by a radical, supportive, wise, experienced, inspiring artist & teacher I’ve had the pleasure to be in a learning container with, Tilke Elkins. Read more below. What is beginning is how I am carrying that energy onward, by creating a natural Palette of the Month and sharing it with anyone who would be interested. This is a hopeful act of staying in my studio, staying engaged, staying connected, despite the many distractions of the time we are in culturally, and in tender relativity to the unfolding environmental crisis.
A portion of your subscription will go to the Huron River Watershed Council, a non-profit protecting a beloved river close to my home.
What brought me here + honoring teachers
The course Tilke taught is beautifully entitled “Being with Pigments”. In Being With Pigments we were led through many “chunks” of rich, detailed, engaging lessons and assignments, all surrounding natural color and our relationship with the beings that offer them. (Plants, Minerals, More).
After a few of years experimenting on my own, it was the perfect step to take this course, one of long-term direct transmission from an experienced guide, and I know I will continue to see the ways it will shape me, my perception, and my practice over time. This course and group has been the sole thing that got me in my studio this year so far, and since it is ending, I want to continue by creating structure and accountability for myself to keep learning about, sharing, making with, and being with pigments. I’m not posing myself as an expert whatsoever. I am always a student, and still have so much to learn. I simply want to share my learning process, tell meaningful stories, experiment, fail, discover, share what methods I use and what happens, and I want to make art.
On following a path
During early stage pandemic, I unboxed a natural dye kit that I bought off of Etsy so my kiddo and I could tie dye with it outside. There is something about the “regular” tie dye kits that were so obviously not something you would want to get on your kid’s hands or your own skin or the skin of the land. I care about soil and plants. When we moved into this house the lawn was so clean looking and made of only grass. We then discovered a lot of pesticides in the back shed the previous owners used - no wonder. Over the course of 10 years we have let the native inhabitants re-claim themselves, and now “our” “lawn” is a home for many different clover families along with plantain, dandelion and yarrow greens, growing abundantly, being themselves, attracting pollinators. I love them. So of course I wouldn’t want to splash artificial dye on them. Earth is my first teacher, a teacher of intuition, a teacher of care, a teacher of communication, a teacher of family.
The plant dye kit was my first time really trying a project with natural color and experiencing it. We had traditional dyestuffs like madder root, weld, osage, and I even made an indigo vat so we could get some blues and greens. I dyed a white cotton skin-tight jumpsuit vivid rainbow colors and couldn’t believe they were all from plants!
About a year later in 2021, an inspiring and generous artist friend Kayla Powers was teaching a workshop in her garden about how to make powdered pigments from leftover plant dye baths to make paints with. At the time, I was expressing to my friend Avery (also an amazing artist I am grateful to be in community with) about how I was really enjoying my painting practice, but not connecting with my paint materials in the depth I wanted to. I liked to paint on natural, unprimed textures of paper and canvas, but we both agreed that when the acrylic (plastic) went on top, there was some tension. Enter an opportunity to learn to make my own paint from natural color and binders? I can’t think of something I could have been more interested in or aligned with.
Once I took Kayla’s workshop a whole amazing rift opened up in my practice. I am definitely someone who has to do something with my hands in person in order to grasp the reality of it. With reality somewhat grasped, discovering how accessible it is to make paint with just a few simple tools, and learning more about other natural pigments from kitchen waste and minerals, I dived in deep and have been painting with natural pigments since then. The process of making paint is so raw and embodied, it feels like returning or coming home.
And of course it feels like that. All my life I have been sensitively traversing Earth, feeling deeply in relationship with beings, both human and otherwise, around me. And my art practice is not excluded from that. To be in relationship with the materials I am creating art with, and for them to be from a natural source, with my hands involved in their transformation, is something I choose as a part of my practice because of how it feels. It really is like coming home - to a natural creative kinship with my surroundings, because that is how humans first started relating to colors and creating with them, with respect for Earth, with reverence for the pigments. Some are even held and protected as sacred. This was far before the Industrial Revolution created a demand for stable, consistent colors suitable for mass production. There is something really interesting about that though, and I’m not bashing synthetic pigments. They are in fact beautiful to the eye and part of our societal and artistic imagination. Pigments of all kinds have had profound impacts on art and culture. And the synthetic ones can be more predictable, which is comfortable and strangely valuable in a world where some art is treated as a financial asset that should last and grow in value over time.
Isn’t it utterly amazing that human minds and innovations in science have resulted in durable and lightfast colors? But I can’t make those with my own hands, I can’t be involved in that process, and that is what separates synthetic pigments and natural ones for me, and makes me feel a bit distant from the former and closer to the latter.
So when I signed up to Being With Pigments, I knew it was going to continue to deepen the impactful, resonant messages I was seeing and hearing from plants and minerals. A class that began on the Winter Solstice and ended on the Summer Solstice also couldn’t have been more of something I resonated with. Our group was held with such care, and we learned so much. Being in community with other artists who care about similar things makes me tear up. I really admire everyone in our small group so much, titled “The Pink Ochre Group”, and I am so grateful. Although the course is ending, the sense of community isn’t, because many of us want to stay in touch. How wonderful! Being included in this small circle of artists immediately after I exited social media has been a literal blessing from the stars. This is what has inspired me to continue in this way by starting an ongoing monthly commitment to deepen my practice and relationships with natural color, and to share it. Palette of the Month Club will help me continue to learn, create and connect.
So this is me kicking off this project by first sharing about who has taught and influenced me. In addition to Earth, and Tilke, and Kayla, I also have enjoyed an Ochre Practices Class by Heidi Gustafson who birthed the incredibly beautiful book Book of Earth which to read feels like an opening of the deepest kinds of spiritual truths, and from my initial quest for methods I am also grateful for Jyotsna Pippal’s pre-recorded online courses on lake pigments and inks, and Jason Logan’s book Make Ink along with several other books and resources on pigments and natural art supplies.
Moving forward, I don’t claim these practices to be my own inventions. I wonder if anyone really can? But I hope that through my practice I can share something meaningful and relatable through the lens of my experience, carrying what I am learning forward, as if in a lineage, with little hope or expectations for bountiful results or revolutionary work or even anyone’s full attention, and just a lot of hope to simply create beauty and connection and to find more reasons to stay in my practice in an otherwise uncertain and confusing time.
I want to share color, because color is a language that transcends barriers. Color is a meeting place.
Subscribe by the end of June and win a painting ◡̈
You’re invited to join me!
Palette of the Month posts will go out to my paid Substack subscribers. Each month, one subscriber will be chosen at random to win a painting made with the Palette of the Month. Your subscription is a gift to me, and I love the idea of giving away art.
The kickoff panting giveaway: Subscribe and win this painting, titled “Hopeful Community”
Each of these paints were made from pigments I processed last year, but didn’t make into paint right away. I wanted to honor them by finally doing so. A celebration of the past for a hopeful future.
By becoming a paid Subscriber before the end of the month, you will automatically be entered to win the painting. I will contact and announce the recipient around July 1.
I hope to share this with you! If not, don’t worry, Field of Visions in general is not changing to paid only - I will still be writing regular posts about creativity and self-discovery for free and I’m so grateful to share with you here, in any way.
With you in the fields and in abundant gratitude,
-Kristen
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Field of Visions is a Substack newsletter by artist Kristen Drozdowski about creativity and how it leads us through self-discovery. Palette of the Month Club is their monthly discovery of natural, foraged color, available for paid subscribers of Field of Visions. Each month Kristen creates a palette of 3-5 hand made paints or inks using botanical, mineral or urban/household/waste stream pigments that are consciously foraged through building relationship with each material, discovering even more inner lessons along the way. Subscribers will receive full documentation of the process, methods, and meaningful stories about Kristen’s conversations with the beings-as-materials and people-as-places they discover.