THE COLOUR OF INK

CURRENTLY IN PRODUCTION - CANADA
A FILM BY BRIAN D. JOHNSON

The Colour of Ink explores the magic of ink-making through the adventures of Jason S. Logan, a contemporary alchemist who harvests natural pigments from unlikely landscapes.

Logan is an artist, author and graphic designer. But his passion is ink. Based in Toronto, he creates vibrant colours from ingredients foraged on the margins of the city: weeds, bark, nuts, berries, roots, lichen, stones, rust . . . he likes to say he can make ink out of anything. He sends his ink to artists and studios around the world, finding such devotees such as Margaret Atwood. In 2018, Abrams published Logan’s book Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking. For its launch, he led a foraging excursion through the wilds of Manhattan that inspired a “Talk of the Town” story in The New Yorker.

The film unfolds as a global field trip, with foraging expeditions that take Logan from the Arctic to Death Valley. As he sources primeval pigments, the story traces the evolution of ink from its indigenous origins to the colonial pigment trade, from illuminated manuscripts to the creeping extinction of print media. The trail of his ink leads to other artists. A Japanese calligrapher goes into a trance to attack a wall with a giant brush.

And in the quick gleam left by a fountain pen, we discover the mysterious beauty of a medium that lives in the moment and still binds us like nothing else—a map of authenticity in our cyberspace of zeroes and ones.