The Missing Colors, and When it's "Done"

Imaginary Landscape #6, 9" x 16", handmade oil on clay, 2022. This was the first to be finished, even though it was the sixth painting on clay panel that I started.

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.

I call this photo "to be continued" because without a white or a brighter yellow, I couldn't get where I wanted to go with tinting this little pencil sketch. I'll just have to finish this when I can make the missing colors!

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.

Imaginary Landscape #5, 10" x 13.5", handmade oil on clay panel, 2022. I find it kind of funny that the clay I used was a white stoneware, and what looks like the color of a yellow brown clay is an oil paint I made from the clay dug from the East 40. Kind of funny painting clay onto clay.

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!