The primitive and labor-intensive processes of growing dye plants, making natural dye, making pigments including from the natural dye, making paints from the pigments and making clay structures to paint them on took up the bulk of this summer’s residency. Now I’m finally using all those materials! 

Around August first, I started using only oil paint I had made in the residency on the clay slabs, and then tried out the watercolor to tint a pencil drawing I had made of something (I’m not sure what kind of plant it is) growing in the community garden.

After only 3 days of painting, it was pretty clear what was missing; a true brighter, lighter yellow  and a more opaque white. Throughout history, from cave painting onwards, many artists have done amazing work with very restricted palettes such as brown, black and white. The most restrained color palettes, especially monochrome, nearly always use white. Problem is, modern artist paints generally use metals for white. Historically and to this day lead white was used, now mostly titanium and some zinc are used for white. The processes to make the metal paints are just not something I’m NOT going to get into, because of how involved they are, the equipment needed and how potentially toxic it can be. I first tried chalk from champagne, France-a natural white material I had on hand because it was used in the pastel and gouache paints I made. I quickly learned why chalk is used to make pastel and gouache-it’s almost transparent. If you add chalk to a paint or pastel, it changes the texture and working properties, but what you see is not so much the chalk but whatever the pigment’s color-blue, red, yellow etc. The chalk just wasn’t opaque enough. Making my own set of paints, and using them, has given me an appreciation of what is essential and what isn’t. I'm using far fewer colors, and it's frankly pretty interesting how far these few homemade paints can go. 

I plan to solve the white dilemma with white clay for white. I know white clay used to be mined from this area, and hopefully I’ll eventually be able to find some local white clay. With the residency over and fall classes almost here, I’m going to cry uncle and “cheat” with some commercially made white until I can make a white from clay. 

When it comes to the true yellow, I’m confident I can do this myself with natural, local materials. I have some dried weld that Marla grew for me in her dye garden, and weld is one of those dye plants that was historically used to make lake pigments. I’ve made lake pigments before, and I’m hoping to just make do with the garden gold until I can make pigment from the weld. At this point I haven’t cheated and used any commercially made yellow paint.

I’m really enjoying exploring the imaginary landscape idea with my homemade natural paints on the clay slabs. I work on a bunch at a time, working on each a little each day, building up the colors. I do of course mix the colors, but I also use layers of translucent paint, where one layer is dry before I add the next layer. The layers are thin so I don’t lose the texture and properties of the clay slabs. The weight of the clay, the physicality is important. They are not images on a “blank” white picture plane. I’m not trying to illustrate a landscape, but to allude to one. 

It’s hard to know when these paintings are “done.” I put two in the ESU faculty show that are so minimal that it was hard for me to accept they were finished. The show opens the first day of the semester, August 29, at the Dunning Gallery on NCC’s Monroe campus. There are paintings in progress in my studio that already have much more paint on them than the two in the show, but they are not “done” yet because to me they just aren’t doing everything they need to do as a painting. When a painting gets to a point where it doesn’t need anything-where if you did anything more it would make it worse-it’s done. The art is figuring out when you are at that point! 

I planted woad the first day of my 2022 summer residency, see the mother woad, and made another post about the woad balls I made, which preserve the leaves for use in later dye pots. Woad also has a long history as a pigment, for example in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, so I was keen to harvest some of the woad I planted, which is already in peak harvest season. In fact, if you don’t harvest the woad, the leaves underneath don’t get enough light and air and shrivel up and die. Woad likes to get harvested every week or two in peak season, and just grows back vigorously.

The next step is oxygenating, and bringing the PH up to 9 with Pickling lime. That’s when you should start to see a blue froth, and if you oxygenate long enough, the froth goes away and then you let it settle for a couple hours, and the pigment sinks to the bottom. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Spoiler alert, spectacular failure is in the title of this blog post. ​

​My liquid turned bright orange, no matter how much I oxygenated, and boy did I oxygenate. Zero pigment formed. Undeterred, I went home and bought streaming access to the first Michel Garcia dye workshop-the only one that I didn’t own because I couldn’t buy it as a DVD. In the first workshop, he used woad, not indigo. The steeping time for the leaves in the hot water is 15 minutes for woad, not 2-3 hours. Oops. 

The next day, August 9. was the last day of my residency, and I went out to the garden and picked more woad. Since I had harvested so much the previous day, and had such a spectacular failure and wasted all of it, I only picked a fraction of the amount from the day before. I took comfort at how fast woad grows, and that I could tinker with smaller batches until I got it right.