Jill Duffy Colors Her World With Handmade Pigments At Farm & Field

In her own words, “hand to plant, plant to color” is an apt description of much of Jill Duffy’s life. The artist creates natural pigments and inks from plants and other earthly materials to use in her abstract paintings. Duffy forages for the raw material, but she doesn’t have to roam far: they surround her at Farm & Field, the 200-acre farm in Chatham, New York where lives with her husband, sons, dogs and farm animals. Their farm store is stocked with Farm & Field’s eggs, vegetables and chicken. It’s a little bit of heaven on earth.

“Sharing the land and connecting art and nature” has become a passion of Duffy’s since she left her design and advertising career in New York. Stewardship of the land has not only enhanced her appreciation of the natural world, but has inspired a whole new way of working on her art. With flowers and plants, and soil, clay, and rocks so available to her, she has become expert at using them to process watercolors and inks, using historic recipes and experimentation to create color as it’s been done for thousands of years.

Pounding, scraping, extracting, layering: it takes an active process to make these colors happen. Duffy plants a pigment garden in a raised bed and transfers the seedlings into the field; now she has a burgeoning bounty of indigo. Her palette comes from so many sources:  Oak gall, sunflower, woad, creek clay, walnut, daffodil, coreopsis, buckthorn, dahlia, purple creek stone, yellow earth, purple earth, aster, and farmhouse brick. Even old pieces of copper — she harvests the oxidation on it and the result is a stunning blue-green verdigris ink. Sometimes, flowers of brilliant color disappoint in the pigment they have to give, others surprise with a gift of a green or gray found only in…well, nature. “I let my intuition guide me,” Duffy says, and then nature takes its course.

Duffy’s studio is in a sunshine-filled portion of an old dairy barn. It’s filled with countless bottles and jars of an alchemist, and curious tools that she uses in her processing. The walls are lined with color swatches and her own work, which spans from abstract geometric paintings to landscapes, all in beautiful monochromatic palettes.

“Making color is a such a tangible connection to the land,” says Duffy. “It just doesn’t come out of a tube.” Materials like acrylic paint are, after all, a form of plastic, but these paints and inks are completely organic;

Now that she has mastered (but is always learning) traditional pigment-making techniques, she is ready to share her knowledge during three natural paint and ink-making workshops this fall. Participants will spend a day on the farm, soaking up the serenity of the surroundings, walking the farm to forage and collect plant material, and enjoying a farm-to-table lunch in the field.

The first workshop, on September 28, will focus on botanical inks — a hands-on experience harvesting in the dye garden and making ink in the barn studio. In October, one workshop is devoted to indigo dyeing and flower pounding in collaboration with fiber artist and natural dyer Laura Berkowitz Gilbert of Tocco Studio. Students will dya e silk bandana with hues from the farm’s indigo leaves and learn a Japanese leaf-pounding technique to design a cotton tote. The third Saturday workshop puts the focus on earth sources and paint making from soil, clay and rocks. For all of the workshops, Duffy says no experience is necessary, just hands ready to work, questions, and an expectation of a delicious meal from the farm. Some tools and materials are required, but she can purchase them for those who don’t own them.

She looks forward to opening Field & Farm to like-minded learners. “I’ve always loved to each,” Duffy says.

Art, nature, and agriculture: that pretty well sums up what we love about the RI region. Duffy lives it and has captured all of that in her art. Fortunately, she’s eager to share it with anyone who wants a day-long immersion creating natural color.