For Jason Logan, ink is everywhere, in the rust that gnaws at the metal, in the streets of Toronto, in the soot that stains the lamps where rods have burned, in the nuts, the flowers, but also in the nails. and weapons.
ink color, this is the name of the documentary by Brian D. Johnson, which will be shown at the International Festival of Films on Art, then in theaters the following day. Illustrator Jason Logan and his quest for color on life’s journey are the pivots of the film.
“I met Jason at the magazine Maclean’s. […] He was the kind of person companies hired to think outside the box,” says Brian D. Johnson, who is also an art critic. And it was while filming a documentary on Canadian poet Al Purdy that Jason Logan gave him a vial of his rare ink for the filmmaker to give to writer Margaret Atwood.
Because beyond the history of each of the colors created by Jason Logan, it is a look at the artists who use them that the film offers. We thus find Margaret Atwood there, who says that she still writes the first draft of her manuscripts in ink. Or Koji Kakinuma, the Japanese artist who draws giant calligraphy drawings with Jason Logan’s magnetic ink made from metals harvested from the shores of Ontario lakes.
“You can make ink with anything,” says the illustrator, who also founded a company, Toronto Ink, which produces inks all composed of elements found in the city.
“We decided that the ink would be the silent protagonist of the film. So we followed the ink,” continues Brian D. Johnson. The ink, more liquid than the paint, traces its own path on the paper, giving rise to the most surprising forms.
cannon ink
The composition of these inks, made from everyday materials, sometimes takes on unique meanings. Thus, Thomas Little, producer of ink, son of a shipowner, draws ink from gun barrels which he lets soak. “With the ink produced from a single barrel of a Remington rifle, you could print 1,100 Bibles,” he says. And Yuri Shimojo, a Japanese artist whose entire family was wiped out, asks Jason Logan to create blue ink from his doomed dog’s blood.
“A lot of ink was made with blood,” says Brian D. Johnson. Saddam Hussein had an edition of the Koran printed with his own blood. And in Antiquity, writing is done using tattoos where ink and blood were mixed. »
On a mummy dating back 5000 years, the ink of the tattoos left traces making it possible to follow the evolution of medicine at that time. Meanwhile, all the digital archives of today’s society could be destroyed with the snap of a finger, argues Jason Logan.
Even today, the blackest, deepest black is the object of an “eternal quest”, says a tattoo artist met in the documentary, who chose to work only with black to cover the bodies. of his drawings.
Jason Logan notably produces it with soot, reproducing ancestral techniques aimed at producing an inky black.
In Japan, during funerals, Yuri Shimojo still teaches us, visitors sign the collections of testimonies with gray ink.
rare colors
Before the production of industrial ink, the techniques of making color with natural materials were the subject of intense work and research. Until the conquest of America, Europeans used cinnabar, which is toxic and contains mercury, to create the color red, the film explains. After discovering how the Aztecs produced red color with cochineal, the Spanish conquistadors kept this secret recipe in Europe for 200 years.
We decided that the ink would be the silent protagonist of the film
The purple color was once produced with the murex snail. And the Phoenicians could use up to 1,000 snails just to paint the hem of a toga on a fresco, putting the species at risk. Today, in Huatulco, Mexico, a handful of licensed fishermen simply collect the juice from snails, before releasing them alive, to create the precious color.
Over the course of the film, a perception of the transmission that operates in the line of the artists emerges, as if each work were charged with the very history of the ink that carries it. And this story brings her back, almost invariably, to sea and land. Jason Logan makes an eloquent demonstration of this at the end of the film.
The narration of the film is indeed interspersed with incursions into the private life of Jason Logan, whose mother, who knew plants, died of an incurable disease when he was very young. Finally, he presents an ink made from natural materials that his mother used. “It’s my mother’s pharmacy,” he said.