The Colour of Rust

For most of this summer I was trying to mix one colour. It was the red of a garden gate at the end of my street, a gate that has been painted and repainted and left out in the weather until it has become something between brick, dried blood and the inside of a fig.

Printmakers mix a colour before printing, not on the paper, so a colour is a decision you make once and then live with for the whole edition. I made eleven versions. Some were too bright. Some went brown as soon as they dried. The one I finally used has a little ochre in it and a very small amount of black, and it looks wrong on the glass slab and right on the paper, which is usually a good sign.

The series that came out of it is five prints of rusted things: the gate, a corrugated shed roof, a bicycle chained to a railing for so long that chain and railing have become one object, a bucket, and the hinge of a door. They are all printed in the same red on a sand-coloured paper, with no second colour. I wanted to see how much a single ink could carry if it had to be the shadow, the object and the light at once.

Rust is usually treated as damage. On the gate it looks more like a record. Every patch is a year of rain. When the town finally repaints it, which it will, I will have the only copy of what it used to be.