Ryan was the first to come up with this idea of using moss paint to write quotes. I thought that it was a little bizarre, but quite a cool idea. Ryan had found a recipe online for the concoction that would supposedly spawn moss with the stroke of a brush and time. It required buttermilk, water retention gel, sugar, corn syrup, and moss. We discussed for a while about the possible quotes to use and which site we should paint our quote at. We finally managed to get together this past Sunday to execute our plan. I was responsible for the buttermilk, and the water retention gel. The buttermilk was easy, but water retention gel was a little harder to find. We ended up buying diapers, and ripping away the layers to find the gel. Then we went out into Whitesburg park in Chagrin Falls to look for moss. No more than a tenth of a mile into the park, there is a stream. It was a beautiful view. It was extremely sunny that day and the birds flying across the creek was a cool aesthetic.
The creek was filled with large rocks, and some boulders that created interesting paths of travel for the water. We threw sticks in the creek observing the path of travel. Right by that creek, there was a patch of moss on a concrete wall. The concrete wall was in the shade, and above, there was a worn down fence that kept onlookers from the top of the structure from falling off the sudden edge. There was minimal graffiti and the wall seemed like the perfect place for our marking to be made. Moss had already been growing there previously, so we had no reason to believe that it would not begin to grow there. We then foraged for moss through the woods and headed back to Ryan’s house. Together, we had a conversation about what we were going to write on this wall. We knew we needed the phrase to be short and we knew it had to be relevant. We decided to look through Into The Wild, and look at some Thoreau quotes. We eventually settled on “All good things are wild and free” - Thoreau. I liked the sound of this one and it seemed to preach a message of freedom that is associated with nature, and I thought that onlookers in the park would be able to appreciate this message. There is something about this statement that I think is so simple and profound, and although it may sound like a mom quote, we thought that if it was written in moss, it would look amazing, and have an elevated meaning. First though, we had to make this concoction, we went along the general guidelines of the recipe, but the process was still tedious. We had to wash the moss by hand, and extract the water retention gel from the diapers. Then, we mixed the moss, buttermilk, water retention gel and sugar all together. It smelled like cheese, and we made a mess out of Ryan’s kitchen. We cleaned up, and placed the concoction in Tupperware, grabbed the dog and a couple of paintbrushes, and went back to Whitesburg Park where we began applying the paint to the stone wall. The application process was a little bit of a hassle. Lauren stopped by because she was nearby and she continued to throw sticks down at us from on top of the concrete wall, aiming at the container filled with stinky cheese paint. Also, Ryan and I forgot some letters along the way, and we almost left the scene without writing the D at the end of “and”. Overall though, I was satisfied with what we accomplished and I hope in three weeks, we will see a fantastic final product, but Ryan checked in on the product today, and it seems like there is little progress thus far. We both had a good time doing this, and I think that if we left a message behind that one person read and thought about, our mission was a success.
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