mother tree

[corvi]

Yesterday juli  and I went to an Artists' Garage Sale, where she convinced me to by some surplus Intensely Blue Paper being sold by a letterpress shop that I guess hadn't found a lot of use for All That Blueness Oh No So Blue.

I made a three-layer papercut. The layers don't actually match up very well, but I'm happy with it anyway, probably because all that Blue is affecting my cognitive function.  Need to solve the technical problem of how to transfer a design to multiple sheets. The answer is not "chalk dust," I have learned.

This is sort of the "mother tree" juli  and I half-glimpsed driving along Lake Baikal in Siberia in the middle of the night, racing to the Russian border before our visas expired. I didn't get a good look at it, just a quick impression of wind-twisted limbs almost hidden under dozens of blue silk prayer scarves. So I just make up what it looks like when I feel like depicting it.

The Mongolian language recognizes two separate colors, цэнхэр and хѳх, both described by the word "blue" in English, which I think is pretty neat. This one is хѳх.

For the past several months, I  have been working on convincing my brain that  "light blue" and "dark blue" are two separate colors, no more related than blue and green, the way a Mongolian would conceive of them. I'm very curious about how difficult this is, as an example of "language shapes thought," and how flexible brains are about that sort of thing.

Convincing Myself There Is No Such Color As Blue: I have weird hobbies.

Comments

[thnidu]

Russian also distinguishes these, as синий (dark blue) and голубой (light blue; ? from голубь 'dove').

[spiralsheep]

I like your tree. It reminds me of the well dressing near here at the beginning of May.

no more related than blue and green

In Welsh "blue" and "green" are covered by the same word. This is very convenient because of the tendency of water and distant hills/mountain to change colour between "blue" and "green" depending on the weather.

Gorgeous!

[dialecticdreamer]

Coming at this from an amateur's viewpoint, I thought the layering was deliberate.

The effect is still very, very attractive, and I like the slight mismatch.

But thinking about it from a technical viewpoint, do you have a plain metal stylus? Trace the layering from A onto B onto C via slightly compressed paper-- in practice, the stylus can make slightly 'shiny' lines, and is a bit more noticeable on textured paper than plain, but if tracing from the obverse, it also makes the line less visible. Play with it; it's fun for its own sake-- and I think you could rapidly turn "fun" into art.

[clare_dragonfly]

Wow, that is beautiful. (Here via ysabetwordsmith.)

[ivy]

I like the way that that comes off as shaped by an invisible wind. Did you freehand it? It definitely has that tree-on-a-bluff shape to me!

[lotsofplants]

I'm confused. Why is the solution to "get blue where you want it" not "cut white paper where you want black, put black paper underneath & secure edges so they move together, cut black paper where you want blue, put blue on the bottom, secure & frame"?

If you want to mentally split colors, I'd advise getting a nice continuously graduated color wheel and draw some non-traditional lines. :)