By Winnie Wang

Brian D. Johnson’s second feature documentary is abundant with close-up shots of ink blooming into pools of colour. The pigment diffuses onto paper, branching into dendritic configurations that bear resemblance to fluvial processes. Water carries sediment from one place to another, depositing material to compose new arrangements. The Colour of Ink could almost be retitled Watermark (2013), another film shot by Nicholas de Pencier, except that Johnson’s film doesn’t quite manage to convey the scale or expanse of human activity as it relates to its subject matter. Nor does it really try. Instead, Toronto-based illustrator and ink maker Jason S. Logan accompanies the viewer on a journey across continents, surveying the history of ink through brief interviews with artists who testify to ink’s unanticipated uses. Whether Margaret Atwood is a worthwhile interlocutor—an author who merely states that she produces early drafts and notes in handwriting—is open for debate, but the film compensates with demonstrations from Islamic calligrapher Soraya Syed and Haida carver Corey Bulpitt. Between these excursions, Logan embarks on foraging trips to concoct experimental inks consisting of peach pits, rail spikes and magnetite.

Led by de Pencier’s striking images, The Colour of Ink aspires towards the lyrical but finds itself grounded as a formally conventional documentary through its shaky commitment to Logan. At times, the artist’s endless curiosity and efforts to resuscitate ink as a contemporary format animate the experience, particularly in its evocation of living inks as “fugitive” materials, but digressive exchanges with Logan’s accomplished friends do little to illuminate the expressive, medicinal or spiritual potentials of ink. If only the film would sustain attention on the intimate details of Logan’s childhood or his meditations on nature as reservoirs of pigment, the personal might enter into focus and eventually give way to the historical. Saturated with arresting visuals that hint at something bigger, The Colour of Ink is an elegy to the medium’s tactility and permanence, but the film’s ambition far surpasses its ability to construct a focused narrative that extends beyond mere instruction.

Winnie Wang