As if painting the land were a way of knowing
Manitoulin Island offers up joyful paints and inks that are both responsible to and representative of the landscape.
A red clay used to make pigments. Courtesy ANONG BEAM
It’s impossible to encounter the charming little paintstones and not want to eat them. Not only are the paints candy-wrapped, they also smell like an apiary—honey and wax and summer. Do note that Beam’s motto is: “Be safe. Don’t Eat the Paint.”
Artist and entrepreneur Anong Migwans Beam makes the colourful little beads of watercolour paint made entirely with and from the land. She sells them under her brand Beam Paints, twisted into beeswax-coated canvas created by collaborator and sustainable rucksack maker Chemistry and Craft on Mnidoo Mnis (Manitoulin Island), they appear to be hand-crafted by diligent woodland faeries precisely in order to make them easily portable and delightful for the artist.
The beads of colour are an environmentalist’s dream, too. All of Anong’s paints are quintessential land-based material, made with lightfast pigment excavated in Anishinaabe territory, and fixed with various local and natural substances: tree sap, local honey, gum Arabic, and maple syrup (this last was a substitution she attributes to her father, the artist Carl Beam). Anong developed the paint in response to her own resistance to working with turpentine-based oil paints and is currently in the process of attaining a safety seal from The Arts and Creative Materials Institute, Inc.
Beam’s business ethos is local, Indigenous, female-produced, waste-free and insistently non-toxic. Even the “plastic” in which some of the materials are wrapped for mailing purposes is biodegradable. The paint comes in various formats: paintstones, as I have mentioned, and Anong has also innovated natural and sustainable artist’s pans made from local cedar and birch cut-offs sourced from a local Indigenous-owned lumber mill. There are also ingenious soft artist’s pouches, sewn from locally-sourced beeswax-infused canvas by Chemistry and Craft—think Winsor & Newton fairytale style. The products are entirely made with local labour, commit to materials that are respectful to the land and, in terms of palette, in homage to it.
It was under her parents’ tutelage in the gravel pits and rock cuts where they mined pigment for their own work, that Anong came to understand the artist as a subject in relation to the land around her. She was homeschooled by her artist parents, Carl Beam and Ann Beam. Her father, who passed away in 2005, was the first Indigenous artist to be collected by the National Gallery of Canada as a contemporary artist (as opposed to the more ethno-anthropological artists the galleries tended to promote in the 1970s and 80s). Her mother is a practicing feminist multi-media artist who was involved for a time with the anarchic feminist art collective Guerilla Girls and currently owns the Manitoulin-based Neon Raven Art Gallery.
As a child, Anong traveled with her family to New Mexico. There, her parents studied the ceramic work of native Diné (Navajo) and Hopi artists in order to expand their own knowledge of materials. In this way, Anong is in a lineage with other Indigenous arts-and-crafts knowledges. It is the pigment that seems to have most stuck with her. Anong recalls that her father, who made all his own screen ink, had access to any colour he wanted simply because he made it.
“The whole candy shop was there,” she said, in a recent phone interview. Both her parents had their own palette. Her father’s was iron red and her mother’s was rose madder genuine. Hers adds chartreuse to her parents’ palettes, a colour lineage.
But it was in the early years of motherhood, wanting to continue her own art practice and being concerned about the toxicity of solvents, that Anong set about seeking eco-alternatives and ended up developing a recipe for a non-toxic oil paint medium. She briefly owned an art supply store on the island, by way of giving herself and other local artists access to non-toxic materials, most of which were Chinese imports. Though the shop was a success, she lost it through a series of what have turned out for us all to be fortunate events.
““She paints with materials reaped from the very locales being painted and so her astonishing work is an integrated labour from start to finish.””
Anong’s first marriage collapsed and she ended up a single parent living in her mother’s home. It was around this time that she thought, “What if I made paint?” And because she had a template for paint-making from her early experiences watching her parents literally dig colour out of the earth, the idea seemed achievable.
Anong’s current art practice begins with the collection of pigment and paint materials. In a recent Tourism Canada video, Anong says that she is “using pieces of Manitoulin to paint Manitoulin.”
Anong’s work is fascinated with large-scale articulations of the local land- and water-scapes, and is quite literally invested, by virtue of her handmade paint, with the actual land and the water she harvests on Manitoulin Island. She paints with materials reaped from the very locales being painted and so her astonishing work is an integrated labour from start to finish. Not only, as she says, does her art allow her to “share the island,” the paint she is creating lets her disperse the beauty of Manitoulin among all sorts of art practitioners.
IMAGES L-R/ACROSS 1. Anong Beam’s father, the artist Carl Beam, mixing coloured ‘slips.’ 2. Preparing red clay. 3. Four Manitoulin colours: wild grape charcoal, escarpment red, cream and ice lake shale. 4. Colour testing. 5. Red and green sedimentary rocks. 6. An ice lake shale green.
I myself bring her paints into my creative writing classrooms in Colorado, not only because they are distinct materials, but also because they give me the opportunity to remind my students that art-making—writing, in the case of my classes—is an embodied practice, manifested through the hands (the etymology of manifest comes from the word “hand”). It is also through the very materials we use as artists—made through bodily labour—that we produce new work. Painting the rocks of Manitoulin “with paint made from those rocks has been really joyful” for Anong. It is also joyful for her many clients.
Locating recipes for paint and ink has taken time and ingenuity. Anong had learned some basics in classes she took at the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1999/2000, but these were simplistic overviews. Reaching out to small ink-and-paint makers proved unhelpful, she tells me, as they tended to protect their intellectual purview. In the end, she researched ancient alchemical texts about paint-making and discovered recipes that she then began adapting to her local environment, such as maple syrup and honey in place of the dispersant ox-gall.
Manitoulin gives up her pigmentary gifts. Anong makes black pigment from wild grapevine charcoal, “ice lake” from green shale, “escarpment red” from the foothills of the Cup and Saucer and “cream buff” from the La Cloche islands. She makes white from the limestone dust generated by a diamond saw used by an indigenous quarry on the west end of the island; for this she trades the workers there her wild blueberry cake for their buckets of mud.
I realize this last sentence sounds like a Walt Whitman poem — the language of paint and geology and geography is luscious and wild.
The current exquisite interaction of paint and ink products is the result of years and trial and error and, as Anong admits, “a tote bag full of paint that wasn’t marketable.” Nevertheless, it took her one short year from its inception to mark Beam Paints a success. Her stunning palette of paints is currently available in 13 cities in Canada and six American locations. From Manitoulin to Mississippi in three years. Not bad.
Beam Paints now carries an impressive palette and media range, including metallic paints (gold and silver) as well as various inks (hemp-based, gold, calligraphic, watercolour, and indigo for quill and brush).
I’m curious about these more esoteric colours that Beam has on offer, and tell Anong that I find it hard to believe that these seemingly unearthly hues came out of the ground, but she laughs and assures me that “no one could find all the amazing colours in the world.”
This article was published in the Spring/Summer 2020 issue of Studio Magazine.
