The Colour of Ink: Blots, Scribbles, and Ink-Stained Happiness
By Liam Lacey
As a rule, I’m against reviewers critiquing works by their friends because, sooner or later, you’re probably going to be forced to choose between being a dishonest critic or a lousy friend.
In the case of the documentary The Colour of Ink, I’ve known the filmmaker, Brian D. Johnson for many years as a fellow film journalist. A few years ago, Brian transitioned into becoming a documentary filmmaker with a film about the legacy of Canada’s folk poet laureate, Al Purdy Was Here (2015).
Jason Logan
His new feature, produced by the National Film Board of Canada in conjunction with Ron Mann’s Sphinx Productions, is a bigger, more ambitious film, painted on a global canvas, and I’d like people to know about it. Last fall, I interviewed Brian and the film’s primary subject, Jason Logan, for POV Magazine and you can read about their thoughts and the film’s long gestation here.
What follows is not a review but, essentially, an endorsement.
Simply put, I admire the film for the richness of the subject and its visual pleasures, thanks to cinematographer Nicholas De Pencier (Anthropocene, Manufactured Landscapes) who created images with an intensity sometimes bordering on the psychedelic.
The Colour of Ink also has an intriguing central character in Jason Logan, an introspective fellow who draws you in because of the way he holds back. Logan is about 50, with a successful past career in design and publishing.
But instead of hanging around boardrooms, he prefers to spend hours tramping under bridges and on abandoned rail lines in New York and Toronto, picking up acorns, brick dust, lichen, flowers and nails, all of which he uses to make ink in his home lab.
Through his one-man Toronto Ink Company, he sends bottles to a network of fellow natural ink users around the world. The film takes on us on global trip to meet a community of artist and historians, drawing ink lines across space and time.
We meet Otzi, the 5,300-year-old tattooed mummy, a wry New York cartoonist, and a Japanese calligrapher who writes one word on a canvas as big as the side of a barn. There’s a California tattooist, an Indigenous totem pole carver and, at home, author Margaret Atwood, who doodles with a quill pen. And not one of them wears a nerd pocket protector.
Collectively, they employ the juices of inorganic and organic materials, bacteria, blood, melted gun barrels and the first human pigment — red-brown ochre — once used to paint on cave walls. The mini hero of civilization is the quarter-inch-long gall wasp, whose bumpy nests in oak tree trunks helped produce ink that wrote Da Vinci’s notebooks, Bach’s musical scores, and Shakespeare’s plays.
There’s a lively sense of awe in the film and it’s infectious. A headline to a story last fall by The Globe and Mail’s Johanna Schneller promised “Canadian documentary film The Colour of Ink just might reveal the secret to happiness on Earth.”
Though the article didn’t make that bold a claim, there’s an element of truth there. The film, following Logan’s urban forager example, promotes a heightened attention to the interconnectedness of things and reminds us how fundamental creativity is to human nature.
The Colour of Ink begins a national theatrical tour at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema in Toronto March 23, followed by dates in Ottawa, Barrie, Montreal, Quebec City, Edmonton, and Vancouver.
If you have a hankering to make your own ink from scratch, Jason Logan is hosting an event March 25, from 1 pm to 4 pm, at the Centre for Social Innovation, 720 Bathurst Street, free to anyone who has purchased a ticket to The Colour of Ink at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema. Each ticket holder can bring a companion but must register in advance. More information can be found here.