For a whole one rainy season in Palawan we did nothing but marbling. Every session took about three days - one day cook the size to age it, iron and mordant the cloths and paper. On the second day a long session marbling, hanging the wet prints on a cloth line. The third day was ironing the prints, picking out the faults, and painting into the prints with acrylics to highlight a feature.
Kris has posted some of the marbling we did 8 or 9 years ago...seeing them again, I'm amazed at the detail and atterns we managed to coax out of rainwater, cassava starch and cheapest of the cheap house paints, which was all we had to work with. Kris took his own marblings one step further, by later looking for creatures hidden in the swirling colors, and highlighting or muting parts of the pattern to bring them out.
Absolutely gorgeous!
He was like a man obsessed when he discovered marbling…we barely had time to eat something and sleep a bit before he was up and starting the next session. Looking back to those strange years living on a beach at the edge of a tropical rainforest is almost like thinking about different people. I’ve often wondered whether the magic that surrounded our intense and isolated marbling sessions could be summoned back, if we tried it again…being changed people, in a quite different place. Guess we’ll have to test that out when the rains start later this year.
Amazing works….