Hello dear friends,
It has been a while since I have been back on the road inspired to write to you all.
This year of 2024 in mid August finds me for a few days in Taos, New Mexico taking a workshop on pigment hunting and processing with found rocks, minerals and flowers. Sponsored by EcoArtSpace.
Our first day was full of hiking for red clay, green volcanic silt, and gray clay rocks, which we then took back to the studio of Scott the Pigment Hunter to process using old fashioned mortars and pestles, sifting strainers and glass mullers to ground down the found earth into fine powders in preparation for adding binders for painting. I am going to focus more on natural dying with the flowers from Scott's dye garden. I brought some cotton and silk that I first need to mordant with the alum I brought on the plane, which security flagged and had to take a sample to check. Thank goodness Alum is not used in bomb making.
While here I am sharing an airbnb with two other woman. We are staying in an Earthship, which I learned about many years ago when I last visited New Mexico in 1996. They are houses built into the ground with repurposed tires, bottles and beer cans as the inner structure embedded within adobe walls. The space is well insulated, and full of plants blended into the landscape with a magnificent view.
Once I have internet I will send photos and a link to the house on airbnb. While driving a Prius for the first time (which took a while for me to figure out, I am not used to these new cars that just use a button to turn on, no place to stick a key, Yikes!) to find the place, GPS was not much help and we ended up searching for the place in the desert for a while, and then once finding it we just managed to get our bags in when the menacing monsoon skies opened up and down came a deluge of both rain and hail! What a greeting, the storm passed over just as quickly as it came leaving a rainbow in its wake.
