Feral Hues Of The Hudson Waterfront

Artist Ellie Irons offers a paint-making demo and painting session featuring watercolor paints made from the feral and weedy vegetal life inhabiting current-day Hudson’s South Bay. The event will also include the launch of a paint-making handbook with instructions for making weedy watercolor paints, and including natural/cultural histories of plant species common along post-industrial stretches of the Hudson River waterfront, and a series of feral plant solidarity postcards for visitors to paint and take away. This event will start in the newly redesigned Ecotopian Collection space at the Hudson Area Library. The Ecotopian Collection is a set of books, objects and interactive projects designed to inspire thought and action to achieve an ecological future in Hudson. It is a partnership between the Hudson Area Library and Toolshed, a Hudson-based organization that gathers and shares tools for living ecologically and was originally conceived by artist Mary Mattingly in collaboration with Sayler/Morris. No registration required. Funding for this event and for the handbook, which will become part of the Ecotopian Collection, is provided by Toolshed. Ellie’s work with pigments at the Hudson waterfront came out of a residency at Basilica Hudson supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Council for the Arts and Toolshed.