Last winter I started bringing my art out into the community more. I now feel a bit more confident sharing what I know about natural paints and inks, and have accumulated enough material to bring along for show and tell and play.

Gratefully, I was a recipient of an Alachua County Art Tag Mini Grant. Thanks to those that purchase the fancy “I Support the Arts” license plates and Visit Gainesville, there are small grants available to local artists like me. As part of this gift, I brought workshops to a diverse crowd of folks. Here’s a little snapshot of what I’ve been up to the last several months!

As part of the Florida Heritage Foods Project’s Crops & Colors Festival in early December at GROW HUB, I created a work station for folks to explore natural pigments and play around with them. Not to brag but I think my table had the most engagement and the most lingering folks around! There’s just something about working with these natural materials that feels relaxing and soothing. I was excited to see many new faces and get to re-connect with folks I hadn’t seen in a while.

** All these photo blocks are slideshows – be sure to slide through them all! **

Then later that month with the most perfect weather for more outdoor art making, I spent time with the amazing kids enrolled in the George Washington Carver After School Science Club run by the Cultural Arts Coalition. Every Wednesday, my co-workers at Working Food, Jesse and Jenna bring gardening, food and art exploration to the club as a fun way to learn about science. This is such a beautiful connection because George Washington Carver was not only a friend to farmers bringing regenerative agricultural techniques to to poor southern farmers, but he was also an artist himself, using natural pigments! Thanks to Ryan Smolchek for capturing a few great moments for some of these adventures!

In the new year, I spent time at the Art Hub – one of my favorite places nestled at GROW HUB where I spend many days tending to the seeds and gardens that are my life’s work with Working Food. Once a week, UF Center for Arts in Medicine provides art classes for the staff members and volunteers. On a chilly winter’s day (for Florida!) in January, we played with vibrant spring colors harvested from last year: poke, turmeric, prickly pear fruits, roselle calyxes, and butterfly pea flowers. All grown on site except for the prickly pear which came from a robust patch of thorny plants on 10th Avenue near my house.

A couple weeks later, we played with indigo! This one was extra fun because myself and one of the staff at GROW HUB, Sarah H. grew the indigo plants (Indigofera suffruticosa or Guatemalan Indigo), which were gifted to me years ago by Jenn Rex, and now we can’t get rid of this plant, which I’m not mad about! We harvested the plants and went step by step through the specialized process required to obtain the pure blue pigment. Students got a chance to learn about mulling, part of the process of making watercolor paints.

Then as spring was at it’s most perfect in mid March, with spiderwort blooming all around, and a stash of roselle from the fall harvest in the freezer, LeAnn Averill from A Thousand Leaves Herb Shop and I did an amazing collaboration – Paint Medicine! A lovely group of folks shared in the herbal magic LeAnn and I brought together. Celebrating roselle, goldenrod, spiderwort and poke – familiar local plants to those who notice, we discussed the virtues of each as medicine or food, and as a pigment source. Students got to taste spiderwort fermented soda and roselle tea, sample goldenrod tincture, and rub a poke root salve into their skin. Then we experienced each plant and the pigments they offered.

The last workshop (for now) was at the end of May, and once again with the fun and curious kids of the George Washington Carver Science Club. They had a special field trip out to GROW HUB, where we started off our adventures at the mulberry tree! We harvested some abundant berries for snack and for making ink later. No one had ever done that before and we were all so giddy and grateful, thanking the mulberry tree for all the goodies.

This time they got to learn about the science of plant pigments – the chemistry that is pigments like anthocyanin (red, purple and blue), chlorophyll (green), carotenoids (yellow and orange). And how these colors signify nutrition and healthy foods, help the plants in various ways, and are colorful and may be used in art!

I demonstrated the chemical reaction that causes the precipitation of plant pigments that are pulled out of solution and into a solid form that can be used for paint making. I did it with poke berries that were harvested last summer and the hot pink foam was a crowd pleaser for these curious little scientists and gardeners! I also had some dried poke pigment they mulled into watercolor paints using my homemade binder solution of local honey, apple tree gum, thyme oil and water. Jesse, my amazing and creative co-worker then introduced a mini tie-dye activity and they made beautiful little swatches of colorful flags using turmeric, spiralina, roselle and sumac.

The grand finale will be a collaborative art show at Cypress & Grove Brewery in August, where we’ll show some artwork and photos of this nature based goodness!

The youth and GROW HUB workshops were proudly funded in part, by the Alachua County Board of County Commissioners through Art Tag proceeds and Visit Gainesville – Alachua County, FL.