This image of the January full moon was found by gazing into a piece of Brazilian agate. Its central area of crackled transparency was surrounded with circles of dark and lighter turquoise, all within an outer rind of chalky white. Some areas were suffused with a delicate tint of brilliant purple. At least these were the colors I translated onto my paper when I used a “local color” painting technique I taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. Local color means the color of an object as it actually appears in ambient light, rather than the color the mind knows it to be.
I prepared a card of stiff, hot pressed drawing paper by cutting its outer dimension to a size that completely covered the slice of agate. I then made a second cutout of a small slot from the center of the paper. I laid this slot over the agate, making sure I could see all the colors of the stone in the narrow opening. After taping the paper lightly in place over the agate, I began the fun part of this color mixing exercise: using whatever combination of colored inks and application techniques I could think of to paint the paper surrounding the slot to be so exactly like the agate showing through it, that the hole in the paper ‘disappeared.’
Sometimes the unexpected accidents of one puddle of ink running into another on the palette would create a color with perfect fit, at another moment the addition of more water across a not yet fully dried surface would leave streaks and stains of ink in unpremeditated patterns. When creating the final painting for this full moon divination card, I searched over the slotted card, choosing those colors, lines, and applications that best translated the surface of the agate, in ink, to the matte board disk.
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
