PIGMENTS, PAINT MIXING, AND KILLER COLOURS

I am a person who gets temporarily obsessed. Plants, colour theory, Mayan history, and sometimes even earthquakes and plate tectonics. I tend to get into something, learn a bunch, then move on with my life. While art is the one things I've really stuck with, there are little corners of the art world that have become minor obsessions for me, and colour is definitely one that is quickly turning into a major obsession.

In high school, I was really fascinated by the realization that pigments and colour have sources. It seems obvious when you think about it, but so many of us take colour for granted because in the last 100 or so years, we have had the most access to colour and we see more colours than any humans that came before us. I learned about the pigment library at Harvard University that is essentially a storehouse for every pigment ever use along with its history. The collection has even been updated recently to include synthetic and modern pigments. Right now that might not seem important, but as the world changes, there may be pigments that become harder to get or their sources might disappear altogether.

People used to dig up a mummy to harvest the brown resin material and turn it into pigment. Not surprisingly, this colour is called Mummy Brown! The stories behind some of these pigments are so interesting. In my colour journey over the last three years I've been learning a lot about pigments, the sources, and what to look for in the ones I choose for my work, which brought me to exploring the creation of my own paints.

Last week I was sick, and I got to the point where I was well enough to do something but not well enough to do anything super creative or anything that required talking. I pulled out my pigments and materials I bought in the summer for creating some watercolours and I got to mixing.

I spent some time previously researching the pigments, looking for single pigment source powders and came up with this palette of watercolour paints. I made a load of these sample-sized dot cards and then I got a little excited and started mixing metallic paints as well.

When I teach colour-mixing, I want my students to use high quality paints and at $13/tube, its hard to convince them its worthwhile to buy the whole set of 12-15 tubes when they're not even sure they like to paint! So this is my solution.

This time I made a ridiculous number of dot cards, but for a reason! There are 45 colours in total. My reasoning behind this is that as an artist who was looking for good, vibrant metallic watercolours, I ended up buying online from a creator in California, and the shipping was absolutely outrageous since it was just 4 pieces of cardstock with some paint on it. So in making my own I don't have to shop elsewhere, but it also allows me to sell locally to other artists looking for the same thing in a better price range.

My inspiration for making paint and obsessing over colour really comes from my fascination with history, so I want to share one of my favourite examples of colour in history.

Scheele's Green:

Scheele's Green was invented in 1775 by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, and by the end of the 19th century it had basically replaced all other green pigments. It really is a beautiful colour, right? WRONG! It was filled with arsenic!

During his exile on St. Helena, Napoleon lived in a house where the walls were covered in green wallpaper. In the damp climate, the wallpaper molded and the arsenic leeched out into the air. Napoleon died of stomach cancer, and though there are other theories surrounding the arsenic preserving his body or something, they have linked arsenic to stomach cancer, so it definitely wasn't a healthy colour to put in your home.

There are so many stories of pigments and chemicals used in the past having some pretty terrible health effects that weren't known at the time, so this is really just another one of those. I think these kinds of stories are interesting because it makes us as artists really think about what we are using, not only for our own health but for the health of people who collect and live around our artwork. In a couple of weeks I am teaching a Solvent-Free Oil Painting course where we talk about safe practices in oil painting, which I am very excited for!

My paints will be on sale soon, but if you're dying (haha) to get your hands on some, send me an email and I will get them to you!

SOMETIMES IT'S ABOUT CONTEXT

Exciting news!

This weekend, October 7th from 12PM-2PM is a show opening in Aldergrove BC through the Langley Arts Council and I've got three pieces in the show! I am very excited as it's not just a show but also a competition. This year one of my pieces was chosen to be on the poster, pictured below, which is such a great honour!

A couple of weeks ago when I was dropping off my pieces for this show, I had a really interesting conversation with the exhibition coordinator. We were talking about painting and more specifically about watercolour and the challenges behind it.

I've had a ton of conversations about watercolour but this one was kind of special because I think it helped me realize some of the things I've been learning in the past few months as I forge on and create more and more detailed pieces in this medium.

I realized that so much of art-making and art appreciation is about context. People say when you're buying home decor, you should take the item to the trash can section of the store and see if you still like it, then if you do you should probably buy it. I feel this is the opposite for artists. We have a tendency to see our work "next to the trash can" most of the time, and it isn't until we put on finishing touches or put it in a frame that we actually start to see it through the eyes of someone else. It really is amazing the difference it can make.

This, of course, also applies to the making of art. I talk a lot about the ugly stage of painting, and watercolour sort of has a double-edged sword because it is the darks and the structure that gets painted last, so sometimes for weeks your portrait can look like a floating piece of skin with eye holes (Dr Who fans picture Cassandra the Last Human...) and it's so hard sometimes to see beyond that.

I only bring this up today to say sometimes you non-artists out there need to get out and see some art IN REAL LIFE! So this show is the perfect opportunity! Or one just like it. The Langley Arts Council has a ton of events happening and so do multiple other arts organizations in the Fraser Valley (and basically everywhere...). So if you're tired of looking at digital versions of real life art, come to my show! It's on until December 6th and it's got a ton of artists' amazing work in it so it's totally worth seeing!

Balancing life and art: A Self-Critique

Being a full-time artist is a kind of a funny thing.

First, you have to make sure you have enough money to eat and keep a roof over your head, otherwise it's unlikely any art-making will happen, obviously. We all are aware of the stereotypical "starving artist" persona and while I'd like to say that's me, I am definitely not starving ;)

Second, you have to make sure you can KEEP being an artist instead of spending all the money you have while bringing in nothing but "good luck" and "I hope you sell a lot!" from every market you go to. Shockingly, those well wishes don't pay the bills!

Thirdly (and for this list, it's the last one but I am sure there are many more), there is a distribution of time to create your work week that seems to make sense but when you break it down it actually seems excruciating to an outsider. For example I am currently teaching ay 6 different places that all run on a completely different seasonal schedule. I also work in an accounting office part time (it makes no sense but I swear it makes sense), and I am a clay technician at a local art gallery. Yeah, it's a lot. But in my head it makes sense. I've not committed to full-time hours anywhere and some places pay me a % of class fees while others pay an hourly rate. So in my head, I am a slave to no one!

But in reality, I work 7 days a week and often have little to no control over how I spend my time during the week and even some weekends. It's basically either I take a financial hit to paint, or I work and try to fit in the painting time elsewhere. Thus "Revenge Bedtime Procrastination" is born.

So recently I learned about Revenge Bedtime Procrastination which is basically a hilarious concept that a ton of people do when they feel like they don't have much say over their schedule so instead of managing it and taking care of themselves properly, they stay up extra late every night to "create" extra time in their day that they can use however they want. For me, I use it to paint or watch a load of TV. Then, because of their rebellion, they spend the next day tired and not functioning as well as usual, but its a vicious cycle!

I am getting better about this, but at my core I will always be a night owl even when it doesn't serve me.

Often people ask how I balance making art and doing all the other things. I hear "I don't know how you have time for all that" a lot, but the truth is I don't. I don't have extra time, I just don't really do anything other than art! 😂

That's all for now!

Click here to shop prints of my art!

xoxo,