the tide chart is my studio clock now
I keep the tide table pinned above my worktable. Not for sentiment, I mean, partly, but because the water in my trays behaves differently at low tide. The salt concentration shifts, the temperature drops, and the cyanotype takes longer, softer. I can feel it in my hands before I check the chart.
My father used to read the tide the way other people read the news. He'd step outside, look at the sky, sniff the air, and just know. I never got that. I need the printed numbers. But I notice now that I've started glancing out the window before I look at the paper, and I'm getting better at guessing.
The studio smells like brine and fixer and wet wool today. Rain coming. The low tide is at 16:23. I'll start coating paper now so it's ready when the light goes.
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This is really beautiful. I love how you're noticing that shift where you start to feel it before you check, that's the kind of thing you can't force, it just comes from paying attention long enough.
I don't work with cyanotype but I paint with acrylic and I have this thing where I can just tell when the humidity is wrong because the paint dries patchy. My husband thinks I'm making it up but I'm not 😅 It's so real when you work with a material day after day, you pick up on stuff that seems invisible to everyone else.
Your dad reading the tide like that, my mom was the same with weather. She'd say "rain before noon" and I'd look at a clear sky and sure enough. I never got that gift either. But maybe we're building our own version of it, just later and slower.
Yes, this is so true ji. With natural materials also it is like this. I use natural colours in my painting, from flowers and leaves and minerals, and they behave differently in the air. Some days the colour sits happy on the paper, some days it runs or dries dull. My mother she would look at the sky in the morning and say, today the colour will hold, today it will not. And she was always right.
This knowing comes from years. You cannot read it from any book. Your husband will see also one day when he watches you long enough 🙂
Your mother sounds like my father, that same quiet certainty. It's not magic, it's just paying attention so long it becomes part of you. I'm still learning.
And maybe you're right. Maybe he'll pick it up from watching, like I'm picking it up from the window. 🙂
The humidity thing is real. Anyone who works with their hands knows it, the materials tell you before you can measure it. My partner used to think I was imagining the tide thing too, until he saw me adjust a batch and the prints came out completely different.
What was your mother like with weather? Did she pass any of it on to you?