A Reflection on Color (AF)

​I’ll begin by telling you that I have made so many errors that I am quite magnificent in my mistakes. In this, I am not asking for your forgiveness in advance, but rather a request for your understanding when I cannot readily remember people’s names (ver-y un-Dale Carnegie of me; I’ve never been much of a salesman, never easily winning friends nor influencing people). Introductions be gone, I'd like to submit for your entertainment value a few thoughts on paint pigments.

 

The class will kindly recall that Mr. V. suggested that within the act of painting, that is, in the use of the paint itself, there is an earth element at play: the pigments are derived from minerals, which are “of the earth.” One can see this as a key to understanding a transformative aspect of painting from thought-imagery into material manifestation. By “material manifestation,” I do mean physicality – an object has a material reality upon which gravity exerts its weak but persistent force. 

 

When we look at the names of our paints, we see words such as: titanium white; cobalt blue; cadmium yellow. Consider the elements. Minerals are metallics. They are by their nature reactive.

 

What makes them reactive? If you pick up a chunk of clay, let’s say you are happily walking along the Little Tesuque, let’s say, you sneak behind Shidoni, you’re just messing around, and you’re picking up stuff. Let’s make it a dry chunk of clay because otherwise it is quite messy and there’s people around, you know. Well, that clay is inert. You can make a brick out of it, build a house, make a pot that might just hold water, who knows. It’s not reacting with anything, right? 

 

Now consider where metals come from – let’s say gold because that’s fun. It comes from dirt, right? I mean, there’s ye olde prospector panning for flakes in the Colorado River (people still do this, by the way), and that’s because the earthen processes do a natural refining, but generally speaking, humans dig up huge tonnes of dirt and send it through industrial processing. Metals are reactive. They dissolve. This frees them from their bounds to earthen elements such that the elements may concentrate. 

 

But we don’t really care about that. We’re not trying to make a gold chain but to recreate some sort of life force that is innate in the materials we intend to use. And how does that all work?

Now I will digress, and you shall allow me because I am old enough to be an elder. Yes, yes, I know, and there’s a portrait of me in my attic. Because I sucked so bad at chemistry, and I felt compelled to cheat my way through class just enough to stay in engineering so I could get a job, Karma caused me to be employed in a chemical engineering group at The Factory. Needless to say, I spent quite a number of years in artful avoidance. Fear not: I will not delve any more into chemistry. Rather, I ask that you think about it in terms of alchemical expression of natural processes. I ask: what would Goethe say (WWGS)?

 

Returning to the process, and such concepts can be described mathematically in terms of energy, we can begin a thought-pathway to transformative expressions, as one does once that tube of paint is opened and expressed onto your pallet. How do you want that pigment to react? Go forth: what is your intention? 

 

Think about this: remember the discussion regarding any painting, especially of trees when we discussed what is the tree and what is the artist? The viewer? We find that we have this sort of back-and-forth thought-transfer, is it not so? Recall also, the Bohr dilemma. Another story (and it’s an old one and no claims on originality): 

 

Heinsberg and Schrodinger are in a car. Heisenberg is driving. They get pulled over going down to Espanola on that downhill stretch out of Los Alamos. It’s regularly patrolled. The cop says, “Do you know how fast you were going?” Heinsberg says, “No, but I can tell you where we were.” The cop responds, “You were going 80 in a 55.” Heisenberg says, “Shiesse. Now we’re lost.” The cop, feeling suspicious, asks to look in the trunk of the rental car. He tells the physicists: “Hey! Do you know you got a dead cat in here?” Schrodinger sulks and says, “Thanks a lot, asshole!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In other words, it’s not always easy. 

 

I lied about not talking about chemistry. If you run a sample through gas chromatography, you will see colors, visually, as the individual elements within the sample matrix hit their temperature of volatility (think 420F, people), shown graphically as spikes on a chart where the x-axis represents a frequency, such as light. So now we have proven categorically that the color we see in these pigments may be defined as a light frequency. Frequencies, incidentally, are a measure of energy, an eigenvalue (don’t test me I think this is right, but see above regarding chem class), and here is where the fun begins. 

 

As we established, if pigments are derived from minerals, minerals are metals, and metals are reactive, with what do they react? A hint lays in words, so let’s just take another pleasant divergence and this time to Cusco because that’s always fun when you’re in good enough shape to breathe there. Being a Santa Fe Johnnie helps. As an anglophone in the local market, I see bottles of aciete, and I’m thinking, vinegar, right? Wrong. It’s oil. Why.

 

The oil matrix is inherently acidic! Indeed, when one works with emulsifying oil with a water-base, relative acidity comes into play so one does not break the solution. It works the same way when making a hollandaise sauce – if it goes one way or the other with heat/time, it breaks. 

 

 

Check it out. If you have a neutral or basic matrix and you add pigment, the pigment will be held in suspension (dispersible, not dissolvable), surely, but the electromagnetic quality of the material itself will not bind with it. I want to try using vegetal dyes, for example, like the beautiful powders the Inca ladies use, but I believe these are water-soluble, probably set with a vinegar (but I do not know this). So, what does that tell us.  

 

Luckily, manufactures of oil paints have this all worked out so we don’t need to worry too much about all that. Tube paint is already formulated and standardized. Different paints brands and indeed different pigment-colors are more stable than others. Therefore, you can play with the media using dilutants (thinners) or varnishes or thickeners (increases residency time on the canvas but is a slow dry) to cause different effects.

 

The effects is where the action is. Once you get the color-frequency the way you like it, and you are on your spectrum (note a sense of musicality?) then the mechanical application of the paint becomes the next phase shift – and it’s a fun one indeed! It’s a dance with you and your favorite brush-partner! This is when you get to take all the intention you put in your concentration of your media into the material dimension that comes together like past lives showing in your magic mirror.§

 

As artist-philosophers, I feel that we are constantly in need of looking for the answer to the question: what makes it art? What gives a two-dimensional planar array of color provide an immediate emotive impression that evokes a sense of life force that is otherwise ineffable? And, conversely perhaps, what does not?

 

And in that, we must always continue to strive towards that perfection even as our human inadequacies mock our pretention.

 

Photo by AMCF.