Acrylic Paintings Collages Sumi Ink Photography Biography Contact

This series was begun in the summer of 2005 because my limited funds at the time did not allow me to purchase canvas and tubes of paint. I had only been introduced to ink in high school art classes so it was basically a new medium for me. I spent most of the summer just playing with the different types of inks, watched how it performed on different surfaces. I purcased some colored inks, some thick viscous inks, inks with blue undertones, warm earthy inks. I was obsessed with inks and seeing what they would do. Here are some of the early inks. After a while,

I started buying so much ink that one of the guys who worked at City Art at the time asked me if I knew about the Sumi Ink.

Some sources say that the tradition of Sumi ink is at least 3000 years old. It is made from the residue of wood that is fired in a kiln at high temperatures which makes the wood takes on the lusterous effects of charcoal, reflecting myriad colors, making pigment based inks appear flat in comparisson. It is most often thought of in its stick form, but I prefer to use liquid sumi and am eye dropper. The Bokuji liquid ink that I use is made from camphor, which is apparently quite toxic if breathed in or if absorbed through the skin. >>NEXT

One Heart One Blow

Heather Marcelle Crickenberger

 Naturally, I did not know this until after working with it for months on end, since once I discovered the medium I would use nothing else.

One Heart One Blow emerged as a five-piece series in August 2004, when in the wake of various personal changes I produced five paintings that resonated a kind of common narrative. I hung them up on the white walls of my rented appartment that had been my home for three years and decided immediately to move. Within two days I had located a perfect appartment, walking distance to University of South Carolina where I teach English as an adjunct instructor, with a large balcony and a huge extra room that I turned into a studio. I could feel somthing changing and it had to do with the inks.

I began to work somewhat ritualistically with the ink, painting as soon as I got out of bed, first with water and then the rich Sumi. The emotional content of the inital brush strokes would guide the mood of the ink as it flowed and spread. The technique felt like a cross between writing and painting as the abstract characters took on a kind of Rorschach quality. It felt like I was doing some kind of productive internal work to find the painting in the spill.

That autumn brought on many changes and I worked through them in my ink series. Some time in October, I met Laura Brown, the owner/curator for a small gallery here in Five Points, Columbia, South Carolina called The Artist's Basement that opened in Fall 2005. On my way to teach I poked my head in her shop and she agreed to let me participate in one of her Friday night shows. This was my first opening and I had never written an "Artists's Statement" or put together a wall composition or anything. before I came up with the statement "In painting language can be forgotten."

The title "One Heart One Blow" comes the ancient code of the Samurai. A good friend of mine who studied Aikido and the art of sushi creation and just about all things Japanese quoted the phrase to me one night and when I told another good friend of mine about the conversation that surrounded that phrase, he said to me, "That sounds like it should be the title of your series."