Orange Beauty - Collaboration with My Printer

Lunar Eclipse 4/15/2014 2:27 am, Full Spring Studio

I remember my mom teaching me about "happy accidents," and how one can make something more interesting by responding to something unplanned, like responding to having spilled ink on your drawing. Later, when I was active in pottery, I saw even more so that letting go of total control of a work can make it more interesting. You have to surrender to fire and chance when you put a glazed pot into a kiln. In that case you don't even get to have the last word. The pot is done - and that can be satisfying if one sees it in terms of a collaboration. So I was delighted when I saw the "happy accident" emerge from my inkjet printer the morning of April 15th, 2014.

Earlier that day, at about 1 a.m., even though it was a school night, our family had woken in the wee hours to view the lunar eclipse. Our older son, was bundled up in the cold, with a book-light, a sketch pad, and his entire set of colored pencils to draw a series of images of the moon as it changed during the eclipse - trying to document its transitions. Our younger son didn't last as long - he was in it for the hot cocoa. I set up a tripod and camera and my husband set up a telescope. That evening our deck was both a night-sky observatory and art studio.

Orange Beauty, 4/15/2014, Full Spring Studio

The next morning, I pasted some photos of the stages of the eclipse in a file to print for my kids to bring to school for show and tell. But the printer was low on ink, and as it ran out, a new interpretation was created. I don't know what programming within its machinery determines how it layers colors, but the orange moon became interwoven with the sky in a way only the printer could have designed. I love this picture - this collaboration with my printer. Somehow in its emptying of ink, the printer captured the transitory feeling of 'eclipse night' in one image, better than I could have with a dozen time-lapse photographs.