PALIMPSESTS 1/3

ON COLOUR

• My history with and texture and effects of ink

• Why the colour red?

• What are my personal references to red?

When I began the serie of INK GRIDS, fifteen years ago, they were a continuation of several techniques, materials and reference points which I had worked with for years, which means that they were a culmination of several techniques and sketch experiments which I wanted to organise in a coherent yet compositionally fragmented way, allowing for spaces between the nuance of colour and the tiny sprouts of seedlings growing out from the edges of each square made with ink tip pens.

Part of my basic toolbox always includes paper, pencils, ink tip pens and drawing ink. If I have these materials I can always work. At the time of the creation of my early ink work, I had just finished my art degree when I found out that I got pregnant with my first baby. All my work while pregnant, happened through line drawings of pregnant figures doing wild yoga poses and abstract grids of filled out fields, in my squared Moleskine notebooks. This kind of notebook has been my favorite since 1997 because of the texture of the paper, it has a kind of give, it has weight, and crumbles in the most delicious manner. At first I took them to be doodle drawings or signs reminiscent of repetitions through doodles on page after page, something that soothed me and sustained a sense of continuity at a time of great upheaval. Later, I realised a potential, to do with layers and depth, compositionally and colourwise.

As with many things in my life, the choice of the colour red, appears to be more accidental than a real choice. Something I grew to love over time. Not unlikely that of the red lamp of which I will speak later. Probably, I just didn’t have any other ink at the time, or perhaps, subconsciously, I had chosen for my box of materials, exactly what I needed - who is to know? But red is a colour I could never wear comfortably, but to which I have always been drawn instinctively to in my work. To me the primary colours imply a kind of brashness, which I have felt uncomfortable with - perhaps because of the way it reminded me of being clumsy.

However, clarity in colour, as seen in Matisse’s beautuful use of colours or Chagall’s, are used with a sense of warmth and feelings of summer. I am an autumn child, born exactly on the equinox, only a few months after the Paris revolution in May ‘68, and it seems to me that I strive to imply the primary colours into my palette, by tweaking them towards autumnal or burnt depths.

My life, unknown to me at the beginning of my time on Earth, was to include more than - it feels like it, looking back - 101.000 blood tests, which I didn’t know when I clumsily overturned filled up glasses with yellow fruit juice, placed elegantly on white tablecloths, or absentmindedly would whoosh past a painting hanging on the wall, or a sculpture placed elegantly on a plinth, only to accidentally let a hand or a shoulder touch these, making the objects loose their imminent balance.

Crash.

©️ Camilla Howalt