The black is not black, and this is the whole difficulty
Since two weeks I am stuck on one thing and it is not the drawing, the drawing is fine. It is the black.
In our work the black line is everything. Without it the fish is only a shape. But real black we do not buy in a tube. We make it from soot, from the lamp, and to bind it we use goat milk and a little gum from the babool tree. My mother used to keep it in a small brass bowl, covered with a cloth, and she would say do not let it dry, keep mixing. If the milk is more, the line becomes grey and faint like old writing. If the gum is more, the brush drags and the line breaks at the tail of the peacock, exactly where you cannot afford it.
Yesterday I made a fresh batch and it came out wrong. Too thin. I painted one whole border before I accepted this, and now that border is sitting there looking like a pencil sketch, and I have to decide whether to go over it again or start the paper fresh. The paper is Sanganeri, not cheap, so I am not starting fresh. I am sitting with it.
My mother never measured anything. She would dip her finger and know. I have tried many times to do that and I cannot, so now I keep a small glass bangle in the bowl to see the level. It is a poor substitute for her finger.
Any of you who grind your own colours, kindly tell how you judge the binding. I am not asking for a recipe from the internet, I am asking what your hand tells you.
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The part about the milk and the gum is the whole thing, and it is not a technical problem at all, though of course it is also that. You are making the binder yourself, so every batch of black carries the day it was made in it. A tube of black is identical forever, which is why it never has the trouble you are describing and also why it never has the life. Your mother's brass bowl with the cloth over it, the instruction to keep mixing, that is a relationship to the material and not a recipe, and the difficulty you are stuck on is that the relationship cannot be repeated exactly.
I work with ink I do not make, but I know the moment when the copy stops being the copy and becomes its own thing, and it happens in the small drift. The faint grey line of old writing, the break at the tail of the fish. Maybe the black you are chasing is the one where the drift is visible on purpose, and not the one from before. What is the fish doing in the image, is it swimming or is it already caught?
I think you are right about the relationship, but I would push a little on the "cannot be repeated exactly" part. It can't be repeated, true, but it can be learned. My cyanotype solutions go off in the heat here and I stopped chasing the first batch months ago. Now I keep a note of the day, the temperature, how long the sun took, and the prints start to have a season. The batch is not a failure, it is a date. Your mother's instruction to keep mixing was maybe also a way of saying the black is never finished, only held.
"The batch is not a failure, it is a date." I have been sitting with that since reading it, ji. For thirty years I was thinking of my mother's black as one thing that I was failing to reach again. But she also was not reaching it twice, she was making it fresh each morning and knowing by her fingers when it was right. That is not repeating, that is knowing.
And your note of the day and the temperature, this is exactly what we do also but we keep it in the head only, and then it is lost when the head is tired. I am going to start writing it down. My son will be happy, he is always saying this.
The last line you said, the black is never finished, only held. Yes. Now I understand why she kept the cloth over the bowl and why she would not let anybody else touch it.
You have said something I was not able to say myself, ji. "Every batch carries the day it was made in it." That is exactly it, and I was thinking of it only as my failure, that yesterday's black was good and today's is not. My mother never called it a difficulty. She would just say keep mixing, do not let it dry, and go on. So for her it was never a problem to solve, only a thing to attend to.
But please tell me what you work with. You said you work with in... and the sentence stopped there, and I am curious now. If you are also making your own material then you know this trouble from inside, and I would like to hear how you are managing it.