MINERALARTS: Iron and Thorn

My backyard pomegranates are ripe and many are splitting open.  I ate the first one in celebration of the New Moon.  This year, the seeds are cranberry pink, not dark red, and are very sweet.  Desert pomegranates often ripen while the skins are salmon pink.  By the time the skin turns deep, bright red, the fruit has usually split open and a variety of birds and insects have made off with the seeds.  Unpicked fruits will dry on the tree and are very decorative in winter.

The pomegranate originally grew wild in the dryland forests of Afghanistan, Persia, and north India.  It has long held special status as a medicinal and mythological plant throughout the Mediterranean, where it has been cultivated for longer than almost any other fruit.  The Spanish brought it to the New World and it is still popular in barrio gardens.  I have loved them since I was a small child.  My grandmother had an old tree in her yard in central Virginia.  It had abundant double blossoms and large glossy leaves, but in that climate the plants do not set fruit.  When I moved to Arizona, I was delighted to find “real” pomegranate trees that have delicious fruit and look much like their wild ancestors if they are allowed to grow without pruning, as mine has been.

Although they aren’t native here, our climate and the oak forest are similar to those of their land, and they hold the essence of autumn in the desert.  The fruit tastes strong and alive, like blood would taste if it were made of sunlight on pink earth rather than rust in seawater.

Here’s a view from my daily morning walk, a 4.5-mile loop along a dirt road and a rocky, sandy wash.  This area is especially rich in dense forests of very tall ocotillos, which are the intensely green sticks in the photo.

For the last two nights, the moon has been spectacular - a glowing copper crescent falling into blue-gray storm clouds, surrounded by streaking branches of blue-white lighting!  Energizing and life-giving, it is a call to work on what is really important, and to seek out and appreciate all that is living and growing now.  Put aside trivia and idle amusements, touch the living fire and work with it, draw its energy deep and store it.

Pomegranate of the Day:  Fire (yellow and orange ochre, and black manganese oxide).

This full moon brought rain and green leaves.  A glass sphere, its surface frosted and etched by windblown dust, shattered into glistening streaks and bubbles as it poured waterfalls and tendrils of green light.  Amid thunderclouds, the rising and setting moon shone with a clear warm glow, like the swirling, molten sphere that forms as silver or bronze or gold melts in the crucible.  This feeling - a transparent globe breaking over my head, and a molten ball glowing in my hands - has stayed with me for two days.  Something old has broken, and a new seed is rolling into life.  I have so many projects going or evolving that I’m not sure which one applies here, but this moon is surely significant for one of them. 

The hot dry High Summer has passed, and we are well into the desert’s “fifth season” of the monsoons.  Ferns and oak trees put out new leaves, ocotillos grow leafy new branches, pipevines and devil’s claws bloom, prickly pear fruits ripen, and barrel cacti grow ephemeral ”rain roots” and swell before blooming.  This frenzy of growth will last until the equinox, when the sunlight loses its summer intensity, the clouds disappear, and all life dries out and slows down.  For those who celebrate this time of year as Lammas, the beginning of Autumn, I will share a summer project:  a coralbean, two months old, photographed after a thunderstorm.  I scarified/burned the thick red seedcoat on the grinding wheel so they could sprout.  Now I have six tiny trees.

Here’s today’s pomegranate vessel, painted in rare minerals - purpurite, lime green gaspeite, and blue-green dioptase.

This pomegranate is a shattered copper vessel.  The little green balls (one is hollow) are the glassy phosphate spheres that form in the ashes of funeral pyres (in the Tibetan Book of the Dead they are called “jewel-like relics”).

Eventually, 28 pomegranates will form the series of daily cards for my moon oracle.  That way, every day will hold the promise of the the Ace of Disks.  Each day holds the the infinite creativity of the earth and the faithful yet ever-changing mysteries of the Moon.  This oracle will have sticks, stones, bones, turtle shells…and pomegranates.  Like the ancient shaman’s pebble oracle, it will be flexible, having a usable structure but not a rigid system.  For example, does the image above represent today’s First Quarter Moon?  If not, which day does it fit?  What if it wasn’t assigned a particular day - perhaps it depends on the time of year - and what if you pulled it at random as your daily card?  (Enjoy this game but don’t think too much about it right now.  Until all 28 images are done, you won’t really know how they “work” - and I won’t, either!)

This pomegranate is painted with four kinds of green clay (plus black shale and a bit of charred bone).  Green clays are sticky and always end up looking rather flat.  But the colors are worth it!  Two of these are glauconite (”terre verte”) from sedimentary rock, and two are bentonite and other clays from weathered volcanics.  Black “oil” shale and charred bone provide the dark accents.  For me the green clays have always conjured an image of a smooth round jar with multiple openings.  This represents the living, growing earth, and is connected to the Empress in the Tarot.  So it was a natural choice for this pomegranate design, which could be a storage jar, a pouring vessel, or a flute.

This one is painted in yellow ochre (iron hydroxide) and purpurite (manganese phosphate).  It is meant to be a soft, comforting shape inspired by two fungi:  the puffball Lycoperdon pyriforme, and the cup fungus Sarcosphaera coronaria.  (I have loved fungi since I was ten years old, and many of them have become part of my spirit, even though I rarely see anything but a few weird and rare desert fungi where I live now.)

This one is an iron furnace, and a scanning nightmare!  I’ll have to scan and adjust the orange part separately, and layer them in photoshop, since the original is bright but not as harsh as this picture.  Inspired by my own ironwork and by some Thai cooking pots that I’ve seen - they are nearly spherical and made of forged and riveted heavy scrap iron plate, with ornate handles and chains. (When the oil runs out and civilization falls apart, the blacksmiths of the Lands of the Tiger will rebuild the world out of scrap metal, using charcoal made from shattered houses…but only if the tiger survives.)  The iron is painted in magnetite, manganese oxide, and charred bone, overlain with blue vivianite.  Did I really need THREE black pigments?  Yes.  I have about a dozen in my palette, all different.  The fiery furnace is painted mostly with realgar (arsenic sulfide), a recent gift from a friend.  I am not usually a fan of the toxic pigments, but it’s a very tiny amount and I wanted to see how such a bright, hot color works with the rest of the mineral pigments, which are on the cool side.  The paint is actually a mix of red realgar (AsS) and yellow orpiment (As2S3).  Realgar isn’t stable and changes to orpiment when exposed to light.  That can take months for a crystal, but of course it’s nearly instantaneous with powdered pigment.  Pure orpiment is bright yellow.   Anway, the pigments that darken the edges of the fire are yellow ochre and orange AMD ochre (genuine Acid Mine Drainage iron sulfate from a Pennsylvania coal mine dump, toxic to creeks but not to humans, and a beautiful pigment).

I did work with some real iron today, and made a dozen tiny triangular bells for a shaman’s belt.  They still need clappers and a chain.  And I sketched the next few pomegranates - I already know how many I plan to paint…but how many do YOU think is enough?

Today the air is so hot it burns, even in the shade, where it is 105.  Vultures fly higher than usual on the rising thermals.  Over the house, much higher than the vultures, we saw two eagles circling each other, heading south toward the clouds.  A reminder of the two eagles that we saw on Sunday, when we hiked to Boundary Marker 130 on the U.S.-Mexico border in the Pajarito Mountains.  Remote and beautiful on both sides of the border, a land of steep hills and canyons, rugged rhyolite outcrops, rare plants, and two watchful eagles:

Today I finished these two pomegranate paintings.  All of my current projects involve a several images, not isolated drawings.  In finishing the tarot deck, I learned how satisfying it is to create a series of related images and watch them develop into a unified whole.  So I want to do it again!  More to come….

One more pomegranate.  I sew most of my own clothes, and today I finished a hiking outfit, an Indian-style salwar kameez made of sturdy hemp/cotton muslin.  The pants are factory-dyed sage green with drawstring waist and cuffs.  Drawstring is an undyed Guatemalan sash.  Scarf is a handwoven cotton rebozo from Mexico.  I used pomegranate husks to dye the fabric for the shirt.  The tannin in the husks gives the fabric the same warm yellowish-brown color as the fallen leaves.

Welcome to the Mineralarts blog, where I’ll post occasional flashes of creative inspiration, updates on various projects, and nature notes from the desert.

Here’s a small painting that I finished yesterday - a bronze and glass pomegranate done in iron oxides, green clays, and malachite in egg tempera.  More pomegranates to come!  They are inspired by the tree in my yard, which is now full of half-grown green fruit.

I spent most of the day at the microscope drawing ferns for my newest Big Project.  Frustrated by the lack of books or online information on the subject, I decided to find, photograph, and draw all 35 species of southern Arizona xerophytic ferns.  Eventually I’ll work them into a website and a book.  Anyway it is a perfect excuse to explore some hidden mountain and desert canyons, though most of the work will have to wait until the monsoons, since at this time of year - when the temperature is over 100, the cicadas sing, and the sky turns white with the noon heat - the ferns all curl up and turn brown, and are practically invisible until the summer rains.  For now, I will use the calm focus of the Last Quarter moon to make the first detailed ink/scratchboard illustrations.