Here i'm sharing with my wonderful readers my shelf full of treasures! all of the things in the picture, on the shelf below are things that have been used to make pigments! In the first picture, the closest things include a murex shell (murex were used to make the famous, ancient Tyrian purple)... Lapis Lazuli from Afghanistan - it's the pretty blue one - in person it's sparkly because of flecks of pyrite, and it's quite pretty! Most of the lapis lazuli that has been used to make lapis lazuli paint (the original ultramarine blue) came from the Afghan mine that my rock is from... and two pieces of turquoise. The small piece is from the famous Sleeping Beauty mine, and the larger more green chunk is from China. (in addition to being used as pigments to make paint, Cleopatra also used both lapis lazuli and turquoise to make eye shadow) :)
The rocks shown in this one are copper (the green formed on the copper was formerly used to make green paint)... behind it is a piece of hematite, which is where red ochre comes from. the hematite is such a soft rock that it leaves a dusting of color on your hand just from handling it. it's easy to see why cave men thought to use it for cave paintings.... the small dark rock behind the hematite is goethite, which is where yellow ochre comes from. it isn't as soft as hematite, but you can get a brownish color quite easily by scratching it. I'm unsure how yellow ochre is actually obtained from it - but i'm looking forward to finding out, as yellow ochre is one of my favorite colors to paint with.... the large black rock in the corner is a natural chunk of graphite! oddly enough the woman who sold it to me told me that a natural piece of graphite can be kind of difficult to find, and in fact i bought the only one she had. graphite is also quite soft, and this rock easily makes marks that look like charcoal marks.
the little envelope you can see in front of the graphite contains indigo tinctoria seeds, the type of indigo plant most often used to produce the pigment and dye. i intend to plant a few in the spring, then process my plants first into dye, then into pigment, from which i can make my own indigo blue oil paint.
Here is aragonite on the left - mine is kind of an earthy reddish color, but aragonite is still used to make white pigment. i have seen pictures of white chunks of white aragonite. i'm not sure what makes some red and some white! ....the flat rock on the right is bauxite, which produces a brown pigment. up close it has lovely spots of different colors. it's quite possibly more interesting as a rock than as a paint.
Next month when I break into my package of madder root to create madder red dye, madder rose pigment & paint - i'll add a piece of the dried root to this shelf. i've also requested a few rocks that my rock shop didn't have on hand. they intend to go looking for them for me in January and February at big shows that happen then. two that i've put in requests for are quite toxic/poisonous, and i had to promise that i wouldn't actually try to grind them up into paint. one is orpiment which makes a lovely yellow, but is full of arsenic. the other is cinnabar, which makes a great red, but is full of mercury! there's a good reason they tell you not to eat paint! ;)
This is a nice collection of minerals you've got, Chrissy, especially the lapis specimen. The copper mineral must be malachite or chrysocolla. I've got a chunk of chrysocolla around here someplace, I plan to someday grind it up. I've seen sources arguing both for and against its value as an artist's pigment. We'll see!
ReplyDeleteI've always been curious about turquoise, it's always been one of my favorite stones. It's supposed to be getting quite rare these days, but I think that's referring to the stones that are hard enough to make gems from - what about softer, crumbly stuff that would be perfect for making pigment? How much of that stuff is there? I keep meaning to write to a turquoise mining company and ask...
If I had some cinnabar I don't think I'd be able to resist - I'd grab a NIOSH mask, some gloves and go for it. But orpiment! I won't go near that one, it can knock you dead. Natural Pigments offers an orpiment oil paint, not for the faint of heart like me.
I've actually never been too fond of turquoise used as jewelery - I'm finding that I'm much more fond of it as a rock than as anything else. the color as a pigment really has never been one of my favorites, but it has grown on me over the past few years. I think it has a lot to do with a similar color that was used in a painting that was done by one of my favorite professors. It was an abstract painting done with large amounts of that color and smaller areas of red and red-orange. I don't think I ever could have dreamed of how much I'd enjoy that combination of colors ~ and it certainly got me looking at that color in a new way. I love unexpected experiences like that.
ReplyDeleteAfter I bought the two pieces of turquoise, I dreamt for several days of traveling out to the Sleeping Beauty mine to see if they'd let me in to look around. (do normal people request tours of mines? or would that just be me?) Since it's so close to home (in the global sense anyway), it seemed like I should be able to find a way to get there and try it, and I do tend to travel fairly often. If you call them up, let me know what they say!
I have absolutely no intention of painting with orpiment. I'll be content to set that one on my shelf and admire it. I don't really see myself grinding up my cinnabar once it arrives either - but who knows, maybe you'll talk me into it. I have enough respect for my materials (and my body) to pay attention to good safety practices - so I would imagine I wouldn't be too likely to poison myself. (My husband doesn't even ask what I'm up to when he sees me running around with a mask and gloves on - I've desensitized him to the odd things he might walk in and see an artist doing, I guess)
I'm still tempted to go buy a bigger chunk of lapis lazuli and crush it up. What sort of equipment do you suppose I would need for the actual crushing? I've never tried powdering a rock before - but that's not likely to stop me.