the sourcerer: Lichen Love.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Lichen Love.

Years ago, in an old National Geographic, I read about a man and his wife who travel the world researching and photographing lichens. I can think of no job more enticing.

Did you know that before WW2, in Scotland and Ireland, all the good tweeds were dyed using lichens? In huge pots over turf fires. Apparently they imparted brilliant colour and a distinctive earthy aroma. Gives me ALL sorts of ideas...

3 comments:

Leslie said...: Marvelous photos. Some of them look like fan shaped corals. My mom loved lichens and I grew up to love them too. Always spotting them on the edge of a board or under a log. Think I might have to try the dye thing on some ribbons and lace.; July 9, 2015 at 12:56 AM
Rosie said...: Oooh lichen love.
When I was in varsity, we were taught island biogeography theory in the Bainskloof mountains behind Worcester by looking at lichens. The bigger the rocks, the more lichens, the more different the lichens. But often, the same lichens on small and big rocks. (To bastardize) Evolution. I flipping love lichens.; July 9, 2015 at 7:44 PM
the sourcerer said...: Let me know if you do Leslie!
Rosie, I wish I'd ended my post with your last sentence...
x; July 9, 2015 at 8:49 PM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.