Pigment Project Unveiling – Five New Paintings
One of the most exciting aspects of doing an historical pigment project is the unexpected discovery and this one is has been over the top fun!
Initially, my plan was to investigate the location and type of pigments found in deposits and mines around Oregon. Right away, I hit a mother lode of information finding copious deposits all around the state. The breadth and variety of colors is truly amazing. Many of the mines are abandoned now but the documentation of the once active diggings are available. Some varieties of pigments are useful to potters and are used in glazes but are not necessarily useful as pigments for paints.
If you are adventurous, you can still dig around the areas to find deposits. To be clear, I did not do this. That would be a monumental task. I took the easy route and purchased the already mined and ground pigments. There are several companies that specialize in historical natural pigments so I let them do the hard work. My task was to use the colors in each new painting. The feature piece, Bright Oregon, includes all the colors on the map. You should be able to find and identify each one.
All five pieces were unveiled at Bronze Coast Gallery in the citywide Cannon Beach Spring Art Unveiling at 12:00pm on May 6th. Each of the additional four paintings feature one of the special pigments. You can see the azurite pigment on the left side of the pitcher in Azurite Modello. You can see the variety of green tones in Terre Verde Modello. In that painting, I used a single pigment and added other earth darks here and there. The color of the copper glows through on all three pieces. The Cinnabar Modello oil painting features cinnabar in the red glass float as well as the pink shell.
Remember the ‘twist‘ I talked about in my announcement on Wednesday? I am going to save that until next time! It is definitely the most intriguing discovery of the entire project. In the next post, I will unveil the painting – along with my fun story of discovery.
Beautiful! I wish I could of been in town for this weekends event! I will have to look in a couple weeks, when I’m back in town to see if your paintings are possibly still there, but I have my doubts as they are beautiful. I love the information about the Oregon Pigments!
Hello Becky, I wish you could have been there also. Hope you will be able to make it back to Bronze Coast.
As usual Margret Short’s work is beautiful. Her last paintings using Oregon pigments are wonderful: another step in the accumulation of knowledge gained through her native curiosity, skills, and that Artist’s Eye. BVS
Thank you for your kind comments. It is people like you who keep artists like me chained to our easels.
Love the copper background for those amazing colors!
Dear Holly, I am so glad you like the way the colors glow through atop the copper. I always try to leave bits of the metal showing through to achieve that end. Copper is also one of the most archival substrates for painting because of its rigidity, meaning the paint does not move. Thus, it will not crack easily. Thank you for commenting, Margret