Hi everyone! Hope the first month in 2024 has been a good start :)
One of the first trees I encountered when returning back to Rimbun Dahan last November was the huge Shorea tree growing next to the office. But it looked very different from the last time I stayed there. The tree had lost much of its green foliage and luster, and the ground under its canopy was mulched by many dried, fallen leaves. The scraggly branches with some leaves still intact formed a nice silhouette against the sky, however. I learnt then that the tree had been struck by lightning a few weeks back during a thunderstorm. It was difficult to tell if the tree was alive or dead at that point; we would have to wait and see if there are any new buds before deciding to cut it down due to safety risks.
Being the only estate that maintains tall dipterocarp trees in a town where majority of the surrounding buildings were of low shophouses and housing, Rimbun Dahan has been prone to lightning strikes. It doesn’t help also that Malaysia’s monsoon season is full of crazy lightning storms that would last for hours and cut off the electricity at times.
A large chunk of the tree had been charred and fell off when the lightning struck. It has been some time since that incident but I could still find the chunk of charcoal intact and hiding amongst the leaf litter. I took it as an opportunity to try making some colours with the lightning charcoal.
For this particular material exploration, I wanted to also find a way to preserve the charred bark and make something with its pigments. But first, quite a bit of effort cleaning and drying the charcoal was needed before I could start working with it.
The charcoal itself was surprisingly dense, gritty, and difficult to grind into a smooth paint, but I enjoyed the uneven texture it provided to the artwork. A beautiful chocolate brown was obtained by carefully sanding wood dust from the inner bark of the charcoal that had not been fully carbonized.
I did seal a few pieces with a mixture of oil and wax. Here’s to hoping they survive the humid environment in Southeast Asia!
I hope you enjoyed this sharing about the Shorea lightning charcoal! Perhaps the next time I visit, it would still be there, just as tall and majestic though lightning scarred, or maybe it would have been felled down already. In the meantime, this memento mori of the Shorea would always remind us of this tree.
Till next time,
Shirin