In the Belly of the Ochre Massif

In late autumn, E. and I visit the Ochre Conservatory.1 After pacing around the perimeter of the grounds, we suddenly find ourselves on a French guided tour – the museum worker does not speak English. A group of elderly Frenchmen take turns asking who we are and what we are doing here. In broken French, E. tries to explain that I am a doctoral candidate in fine arts and the purpose of us coming here is to gather materials for research on local ochres.

As I enter the Conservatoire’s Museum, I am greeted by the smell of dust and by walls painted in soft brown and red hues. Old shelves are filled with glass vials of various shapes and sizes; most of them have carefully calligraphed labels, already yellowed from age and dust. Among the blue pigments on the upper shelf there is a bottle of synthetic YInMn blue,2 which oddly contrasts with the cohesive whole – the label printed in Calibri font and attached with adhesive tape seems out of context. On the floor, bags made of double-layered paper full of earth pigments are lined up, marked with stamps of the ochre factory, and referring to a location of export. A shelf of bottles, densely packed into a niche, is covered with a metal mesh; perhaps to prevent someone from disturbing the bottles or to prohibit a curious visitor from having the audacious idea of putting one in his pocket.

Each display glass case has French inscriptions: couleurs artificiel, synthetique, animal, végétal, mineral. My sight dissolves in the wide range of diverse colours; a blue cake of pure ultramarine is elegantly packaged in a box on which bleu outremer is emblazoned in golden script. Wax-sealed necks on the flasks keep the coloured dust from getting out. The cochineal beetles are capped with a glass stopper that prevents even the smallest insect leg from escaping. The resins of the binders, crystallised into irregular shapes, are labelled as shellac, sandaraque, gomme arabique, gomme gutte, copal, dammar, jaoui, masticen.3 I feel an urge to touch the crystals and feel their texture; however, the cleanly wiped glass of the cabinet window reflects my impertinent thought.

The worker at the conservatory continues to talk empathetically about the processes of ochre extraction: the cleaning, grinding, processing and purification mechanisms stretch across the entire conservatory grounds. I strain my ears to catch the sporadically comprehensible words. A couple of metre-deep basins were built for storing and drying the purified ochre. Sewers run through the courtyard to drain the filtered pigment into the pits separating sand from the pigment. The purified ochre settles at the bottom of the basin forming a layer around forty centimetres thick. Then the pigment is dried for several months before being cut into rectangular tiles.4

I wander around, reading the plaques affixed to the red-painted buildings scattered around the site. They tell the story of the complex process of extracting the ochre, perfected in the eighteenth century by Jean-Etienne Astier, a story consisting of the stages of sieving, washing, separating ochre particles, and drying. An important part of the process was the worker’s sense of proper timing – knowing when to open the valve and let the water, laden with particles of clay and aleurite, drain. A simple test, repeated, helped him identify the right time: If he could no longer feel the squeak of sand between his teeth, it was time to open the valve.5

Many abandoned mines can be found scattered around the Luberon region; they have been disused since the end of the nineteenth century when the technology of ochre extraction became mechanised. Before then, the pits were excavated by two people working side by side, one right-handed and the other left-handed, which made it easier and more efficient to dig deeper.6 However, their iron tools wore out quickly due to the presence of quartz in the sand. Nowadays, quartz dulls the edges of excavator buckets, but the Ochre Conservatory, once a factory and today a museum, remains a romantic reminder of the past, with a profound tradition of extracting the earthy pigment.

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The yellow dust particles cling to my clothes; I try to brush them off, but they settle playfully on my light-coloured jacket. At the entrance to Le Colorado Provençal, a sign greets me – wash your clothes with icy water to remove the ochre. I am intrigued by the chance it will not wash off, and I recall a story I discovered while talking with a textile artist about a specific method of dyeing fabrics by dipping the material in a pond of clayish soil. The inhabitants of the islands of Southern Japan call this technique dorozomi.7 When the Japanese samurai occupied the area in the seventeenth century, the locals buried their kimonos in clay pits to hide them from the dreaded invaders.

I choose the longest route, starting in the eastern part of the park. A mountain of vibrant ochre looms before my eyes; rivulets of limonite trickle from beneath the pinkish surface. I notice immediately that the yellow there is cleaner. Here and there are sinkholes, rain scrapes, and paths carved by centuries; wind and rain have smoothed the sharp slopes left by mining activity. The layers reveal steps sculpted out in the last century, and I climb them to find myself in the belly of an ochre massif. Wooden poles are lined up along the slopes at a respectful distance; they testify to paths trodden by carelessly curious travellers. In some places the sgraffito, carved by past generations with the names of those who visited, is inscribed into the rocks. Plant and tree roots reinforce the soft ochre, burrowing into it as if trying to trap it (Pinus halepensis, various species of Phrygana scrubs). As the path winds on, an almost painfully red landscape greets me from around the corner. I squint.

The history of the formation of the ochres dates to the Early Cretaceous period (about 100.5 million years ago), when the Provence region was submerged under a shallow sea. During the Cretaceous, Provence was located on the shelf of the Eurasian continent; as the adjacent continents subsided, particles of organic matter and quartz were carried by the wind and deposited in Provence. Sand layers settled on the seabed; they turned green with the formation of the clay mineral glauconite, which became the base material for the formation of the ochre massif. During the Late Cretaceous period (about 90 million years ago), the sea retreated due to the movement of tectonic plates. In the humid, mild tropical climate (Provence was then closer to the equator), the iron in the glauconite began to oxidise and became goethite (iron oxyhydroxide). The processes of climate change altered the iron compounds; therefore, the colours and materiality of the rocks began to vary over time. Ochres turn from yellow to red due to atmospheric factors such as wind sifting, solar heat, and rain pressure; the sun causes water to evaporate and gradually the colour turns red. This way, the yellow and red tones alter over time, building up sediments that have become valuable resources for earth pigments.

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I caress the soft, yellow surfaces with my palms; the orange enchants me, and I suddenly fall in love with the red, with which I have never had a close relationship. Immediately, I am fascinated by the revealed layers – thin and fragile, the others massive and unmovable. The surface, warmed by the autumn sun, is pleasant to the touch; the earth seems soft, soaked in the mountain moisture. Here and there, the forests are full of iron-tipped streams of young limonite, where the stagnant water glistens under the feet of those who pass by.

The top of the slope shows a lighter, whitish shade typical of limestone, with a heavy purple, almost violet-coloured, monolithic mass above. Black shiny hematite fragments lie in the outcrops on the sloping planes. I recognise them immediately; their weight feels pleasant in the palm of my hand, the metallic sheen of the black surface reveals the ferrous nature of the rock.

The Greeks believed that red ochre was bleeding earth because of the mineral haematite (gr. haima + lithos = blood stone), which has a purplish-red colour when ground to powder. Pliny the Elder identified haematite as a remedy for bleeding-related disorders; a mixture of red wine and haematite powder was used to treat snake bites.8

Haematite is also frequently mentioned in medieval treatises on semi-precious and precious stones, known as lapidaries, which interweave astrological, mystical, and alchemical narratives. In his poetic treatise on precious stones Liber Lapidum, the British bishop Marbodius described haematite as one of the minerals used to treat human ailments: A mixture of red dust and honey was used as a remedy for poor eyesight.9

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How would a person who does not distinguish colours see these layers of the landscape? Would (s)he see them as dull, low-toned layers of earth? During my master’s studies, I met a person with a mild form of protanomaly (impaired red vision). He found it hard to recognise the colour red; his eyes could not distinguish the wild strawberries hiding in the grass, so his handfuls were empty – then he confessed that he found red greener. However, he was more sensitive to tone and therefore developed the skills of the sgraffito technique.

Sensitivity to colour distinction is crucial for a painter who can identify and name different hues. Umberto Eco, in his essay “How Culture Conditions the Colours We See,” insightfully notes that “The fact that a painter (think of Paul Klee) can recognize and name more colours, the fact that verbal language itself is able not only to designate hundreds of nuances, but also describe unheard-of-tints by examples, periphrases and poetic ingenuity – all this represents a series of cases of elaborated codes.”10 This way, the gesture of naming expands colour as a linguistic and/or cultural construct. Therefore, parallels, paraphrases, and poetic variations come in handy. In the textile tradition of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, there are colour names such as green seawater, wild boar’s fur, or beetroot dew.11 In English, they become even more abstract: amaranth (the colour of a cherry red, a dusty grape or a rich plum), fuchsia (a vibrant blueish pink), celadon (the colour of forest fog), buff (tanned ox-hide colour), fallow (faded caramel brown, with a tinge of dead leaves or grass), mole (deep grey, tending to cold), obsidian (black or very dark bronze, sometimes with a golden or iridescent shimmer).12

Therefore, the name of a colour can often dissolve its nuances, which can only be perceived visually. The Greeks, interestingly, did not have the word to name the colour blue.13 One of the few references can be traced to the word glaucus (meaning greenish, light-green, and greyish blue), which was associated with the myth about the fisherman Glaucus, who ate a magic herb, leaped into the sea, and became immortal. It could imply that they had no perception of blue (yet think of the many shades of the Mediterranean sky!), but if one considers colour as a cultural/linguistic construct, it becomes coherent because of the rarity of blue in nature. In contrast, the name of red was highly nuanced: flammeus (the red of fire), sanguineus (the red of blood), aureus (the red of gold), croceus (the red of saffron), and many more. 14 But evidently the role of red in ancient cultures was much more deeply rooted in the material world.

I face the challenge of colour naming every time I arrange the rocks and earths I have collected and brought with me to the studio. In the cold light of day, the shadow side of the stone often looks warmer than the lit side. When the stone is split open, the core sometimes appears deep brown, contrasting gently with the yellowish crust of the surface – a reference to the manganese (Mn) that has accumulated inside the stone. The challenge becomes even more difficult when the extracted pigments are placed side by side: The limitations of colour as a linguistic construct becomes obvious. Here, this yellow is warmer than the one next to it, which tends slightly towards green; as the colour spectrum shifts to the left, the yellow warms up and moves towards the soft browns. However, it eventually became clear that at least some of the individual pigments did not fit into verbal expressions.

In my practice, the gesture of naming a colour has a certain fluidity; the title often occurs from material engagements. At times, the name refers to their geological origins; Triassic red or Neogenic violet extracted from sediments which formed during these periods. Gloomy river green does not refer to a specific shade, but to the natural setting where it was collected. Cloud grey became an embodiment of the humid summer day when the dust finally was washed away after a long heat wave; then, the earth smelled like rain. Road purple is an immaterial pigment existing only in my memory: It was lost during an intense journey to Morocco. In many cases the name never appears; rather, the experience of collecting stays embedded in the tiny particles of colour.

The word “colour” is rooted in Old Latin word occulere, “to cover, conceal,” which suggests an interesting notion about colour as a surface or a shell, concealing an object’s true nature. Johannes Itten distinguishes two dimensions of colour perception: as chromatic reality and as chromatic experience.15 In the former, the pigment exists as a colour, with an identity independent of visual conditions; this is mediated into generalised schemes of the colour wheel, which was based on colour field studies. The second, which concerns perception, is obviously conditional; it depends on the colour relation, surface, light, and contrast. Itten points out the psychological dimension of colour perception, which also involves personality traits. Here it is useful to have a trained eye, sensitive to even the slightest colour nuances. However, without embarking on the psychology of colour, it is more interesting to consider the dichotomy of colour perception – the tension between objective and subjective experiences.

Would a painter, looking at the colour scale of several hundred pigments in test tubes, be able to distinguish between a warm yellowish green and a slightly colder yellowish green? Would the recognition of these colour nuances be conditioned by the kind of skills Giorgio Morandi developed when he painted hundreds of still-lifes composed of dusty bottles and devoted his life to exploring the different shades of grey in these objects? To name a colour, one must sharpen one’s gaze even more, to use the instruments of visual perception – to play with the subtleties of colour, to puzzle them out in search of descriptions that cannot be fitted into words.

On Pigment Ontology

Back in the studio, I arrange rock specimens gathered from distinct landscapes, and a glance at the mirror standing in the corner offers a space for reflection. Each extracted pigment is a character with its own story, embedded in tiny particles of matter. After spending a great deal of time archiving and sorting out the specimens, looking for relationships between colour and origin, (hi)stories emerge. While I am immersed in the slowness of the studio,16 the pigment slowly begins to reveal itself. Before I crush the stone, I feel its weight and texture in my palm, I can smell its dusty surface. I observe how it merges with the binder into alchemical dyads17 – how it changes colour and graininess when diluted in linseed oil, gum arabic, or hide glue; how it is absorbed by paper or a chalk-painted wall.

My fingernails turn dark green from terra verde extracted from the glauconitic sand discovered last autumn while wandering through the slopes of the river. Slowly, I mix it with a binder, watching how the heavy, fatty earth unexpectedly becomes transparent when laid on paper. The colour reveals itself, and all I can do is observe and take notes. But is it enough? Is my gaze enriched by the knowledge of what the pigment is made of and how it was formed on the slopes of the river in the Early Cretaceous period? Understanding the geological context helps to expose the pigment, clarifies the features of its physical manifestation, but it does not exhaust the question of what the pigment is. I patiently wander, capture landscapes, collect materials and extract the pigments; in the process, each one of them acquires historicity. The personal approach becomes intertwined with cultural contexts: In the creative process, the materials begin to talk to each other. I try to listen to their dialogue from a distance.

An inner need to grasp the essence of a pigment led me to a river of ontology, which I began to wade through in search of answers. Painter Mark Titmarsh notes that “ontological thinking involves returning to first principles and considering things, beings as such, in their very state of being.”18 While thinking about what that means, I am drawn in by the need to go back to the foundations – like an archaeologist digging up the strata of meaning. But the answer to this question does not succumb to the reductions of cognition, because here the will of the subject becomes the axis of meaning, which limits the understanding of nonhuman objects. The question is whether empirical knowledge determines what a pigment is. Does colour theory help reveal the nature of colour, or does it focus only on the visual appearance of the object? I wonder whether the ability of a physicist to explain the phenomenon of colour as a specific wavelength provides him with a deeper comprehension of colour. Or can the privileged ability of a painter to poetically name colours and to describe the differences between different shades of umbra provide access to deeper meanings of the materials?

Drifting away from the Cartesian duality of mind and matter, and separation between natural sciences, a hierarchical approach starts to dissolve in the discourse of contemporaneity. Harman argues that objects, it is argued, are not (or can only in a limited way be) fully comprehensible to human beings but have a meaningful foundation beyond human perception. Subjectivity obscures the silent object – the human inner dialogue (language) becomes a disturbance and oversimplifies the phenomenon by superficially describing its properties, which are always relative.19 The conception of flat ontology may appear as an inviting scheme which, in theory, bends the hierarchy; it offers a revised understanding of agency – the capacity to act independently. Latour notes that

A nonanthropomorphic character is a character all the same. It has agency. It moves. It undergoes trials. It elicits reactions. It becomes describable. This, however, does not mean that we are “projecting” anthropomorphic features on what should remain an object: it simply means that the shape, that is, the morphism, of the human character is just as open to inquiry, to shape changing, as that of a nonhuman.20

Then, it is a question of autonomy and boundaries which we drew trying to separate the natural world into its constituent parts by trying to explain it through empirical data. From a traditional perspective of Western thought, one cannot escape from a certain futility in trying to empathise with a rock or a pigment, mostly because of our differences as species, as opposites (organic and inorganic bodies), and this notion having been formed through centuries of division between human and nature in the natural sciences. The reductive view towards the rocks as “just” material “…erased the divinity of nature by turning perception towards the purely phenomenological (constrained by a reductionist approach).”21

A certain tension then appears: the supposition that the rock (or a pigment) is fundamentally different from us (therefore, its core meaning is inaccessible to us) and the supposition that it can be accessed through material engagements, which involves fundamentally rethinking our similarities rather than differences. There is a large amount of iron (Fe) flowing through our veins, which is the main element determining the colour of ochre.22 We have kidney stones growing in our bodies when there is a surplus of calcium, oxalate, or uric acid, which causes these materials to crystalise into solid structures. The observation of our bodies as vehicles capable of growing “living rocks” contracts the distance between our differences, and we seem closer to them, bearing in mind the common ability to grow, crystalise, and sediment. The human body is mostly composed of cosmic dust which emerged when high- and low-mass stars were dying.23 All these cases raise compelling thought about our position in the scale of deep time and relation to otherness.

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A personal experience that often opens new niches for reflection is a crucial moment, which can alter the perspective. After returning from an expedition to Draa valley in Morocco, I was confronted by an unexpected situation, in which the subject of loss and ownership became motifs for further ponderings. During the journey, I gathered materials with a vivid image of myself ecstatically arranging and contemplating the rocks, drawing maps, extracting pigments, and organising them in glass vials. As I touch the materials, I immerse myself again in the moment: in valleys and on roadsides. In the deep beds of dried-up rivers and places only accessible on foot. Through paths covered in pink dust, through whose ravines the Imazighen travel with their belongings. At that moment, I seemed to discover a part of myself, and slowly I began to fill up – as if I was meeting strangers with whom I thought I had spoken once before, distant dream companions. But by chance I lost my carefully gathered collection, and perhaps not without a reason.

I realised that everything seems to be based on my intention as a compiler of an archive, one who collects the materials with an almost obsessive intent. The ambition to possess these colours, to capture and admire them, may have been the obstacle over which I painfully stumbled. The experience of loss made me rethink my personal approach towards materials, which could partly be linked to the problem of ownership. Bjornerud writes about her expedition to pegmatite mines in Colorado where she and her colleagues were looking for gem pockets. She vividly recalls her experience of discovering a perfect tourmaline crystal:

In an instant, we were all seized with a visceral greed, a need to take as many of these treasures as we could. We had come with our rock hammers, but the pick ends were blunt, designed for breaking rocks, not extracting delicate crystals. I managed to tap out a few small deep-pink tourmalines, and then spotted a prize: a perfect watermelon-colored crystal […] I was determined to have it. I began pounding away, thinking ahead how I would display this trophy at home when, in one errant blow, I smashed it.24

Paul Prudence poetically defines this obsessive need to collect rocks as Lithophilia. He tells a story about a Chinese emperor Huizong, who had an impressive collection of biomorphic Lingbi stones.25 Huizong, while meticulously perfecting his gardens, arranging, and inscribing the stones with the stories, didn’t notice the invading Jurchen nomads. These invaders used his precious stones for catapults to bombard the empire, turning his own obsession against him; therefore, his meticulously created universe became lost.

Reflecting on these experiences, including my personal one, it became quite clear that the universal obsession for owning materials is a small-scale event which is parallel to larger processes of extractivism. Clearly, a personal experience resonates more strongly than one observed from a distance. It raises questions about our own relationship to material world and attachment to the world of “things” and our dependence. Enchanted by the beauty of geological formations, it is inherent in our human nature to desire these treasures for or own possession. On the other hand, the occurrence of such events can teach us about appreciation for deep time, and knowledge about the complicated processes which took place throughout hundreds of millions of years.

The Substance Trap

Entangled in the trap of Aristotelian thought, I naively hoped to find answers to the intuitive questions about the mysteries of the pigments’ being, which became easier to formulate after turning to the myriad of texts on the study of the subject of substance. As is often the case, the process raised more questions than it answered, and suddenly I found myself trapped in a web of meanings which I had woven (un)intentionally.

Aristotle categorises substances by arranging them into a structure. The concept of secondary substance involves the set of intrinsic properties of objects as well as their generalisation.26 Where would a pigment fit on the shelf of substances? If it is treated as a secondary substance to which properties such as colour, intensity, translucency, and weight can be attributed, it lacks the aura of individuality. Most of the pigment treatises have a content with a clear structure – pigments are grouped by colour or alphabet (principle of a dictionary).27 Thus, we begin to drown in generic nouns that emphasise a pigment’s essential feature – its colour. But can a pigment be(come) a primary substance? The hierarchical organisation makes it a challenge to consider the individuality of the pigment, which is a condition of primary substances. Is the Stone of Jacob, on which he laid his head and dreamed a prophetic dream,28 a purer substance than a nameless stone discovered while wandering on a riverbank? Does the religious significance mark it with a metaphysical aura?

What happens when a pigment takes on a unique character – when it is added to the story of the collection and the personal significance it implies? In that case, it seems that its position in the hierarchy of substances depends on the point of view. From a personal perspective, a pigment can become very precious because of the meanings it holds; these accumulate in the process of extraction, which consists of the stories of its discovery, origins, and practice. In this way, each of the pigments becomes an object of personal value, a substance of the landscape and its experience.

This (nameless) stone, having become a pigment, undergoes a substantial change; I transform it not only in a physical, material sense (as I break it down into many particles, the whole of which is considered a pigment), but I am also abandoning its stoniness. But its stony nature is still encoded in the particles; chemical tests make it clear from what material it was made, what its iron content is and the degree of oxidation that defines the colour of ochre. Ingold makes a distinction between materials and materiality, which rests on the notion that “an object [is] formed through the imposition of mental realities upon material ones.”29 Therefore, by undergoing a physical transformation, it becomes marked by the mental projections of an artist, but materiality is present behind the visible even though it has already lost its original shape; this is the case with earth and mineral pigments. Interestingly, the word “material” is rooted in the Latin mater, which refers to the noun mother (a source or origin) and only later to “substance of which something is made.” It could bridge these seemingly opposite realms of the same object. Essentially, mental realities emerge when an artist embeds the material with meanings.

The idea of the elevation of substance goes back to the practices of alchemists; for centuries, alchemists have been immersed in the processes of purifying the quintessence. Their experiments with various distillation techniques have been catalysed by the idea that inferior, impure materials can be elevated to pure substance through chrysopoeia (the process of transmuting base metals into gold). The goal of an alchemist was to purify one of the elements (mostly based on the Aristotelian theory of the four elements) while eliminating its other properties.30 An alchemist and a painter were engaged in processes that were materially and conceptually related. Each of them struggled with the matter, which results only through careful, consistent work, often accompanied by the inevitable disappointments that are followed by the experience of catharsis. Perhaps through such practices, encrypted with a personal philosophy of poetic language, alchemist and painter may have a better chance of accessing the meanings of materials.

In the Shadow of Painting

It is always exciting to engage in conversations that raise questions about the origins of a subject or phenomenon. I asked a few colleagues of mine what painting is,31 and suddenly I started to doubt the shallowness of my question. Presumably, every painter could give a range of subjective insights, determined by his or her experience and approach. From the mastery of technique – the preparation of the canvas, application of paint – to the complex study of the motif, the nuances of colour, composition, and intrinsic value. All these elements become important criteria, but this formulation does not answer the question of what painting is; rather, it defines its conditions. Most of these criteria describe formal features, but it can be argued (and this is always intriguing) that they also belong to a deeper realm, to a feeling that does not lend itself to verbal structures, such as the study of a motif or the creation of an atmosphere.

When seen in the context of painting, the pigment functions as an element that carries historical and cultural weight, with meanings hidden beyond the surface of the paint. The process of immersion in a dialogue with these elements could be defined as “cultural engagement with matter.”32 These are the symbolisms of the colour, discourse, and the ways in which both are used; symbolic presence in a particular place in the painting has significance (think of the celestial ultramarine, which until Titian was used exclusively in a highly sacred context). But this schematisation reduces the pigment to a cold, alien body and emphasises the futility of man’s efforts to know it. What (and how) can pigment tell us by itself, not framed in viscous theories, not linked to painting, and not contextualised? I search for an explanation, but I am left perplexed. I look silently at the row of yellowish chunks of ochre.

In the Lithuanian language, the word tapyba (painting) could be linked to the word tapsmas (becoming). The ontology of painting could be approached through this linguistic relation; if one considers painting as an act of becoming, it makes sense to regard it as a transformation of raw materials into pure essences. Titmarsh notes that “paint separated off from painting, is paint released into an unusual state of becoming. It is paint becoming something else, yet to be named, a process in some sense unnameable.”33 Material is the fundament which is moulded to embody ideas; although it is not entirely definable, it seems that it comes closer to the explanation of what painting is.

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Alchemists and artists were both concerned with a common eternal alchemical problem about the extraction of quintessence. Obsessed by the constant struggle with materials and the uncertainty of how things will turn out, they strove to create the conditions in which the unknown could emerge. Through metaphors, the methods and experiences are cyphered into allegories and personal symbolism in a way that only a highly intelligent mind can access this knowledge, thus leading to obscurity and mysticism, which emerges through interpretations and attachments of religious or mythological concepts. In his treatise on painting, Cennini poetically writes about such measurements as “less than half a bean” or “a nutshell,”34 which may appear vague in terms of specifying exact amounts of certain ingredients: What kind of a bean or a nut does he have in mind? A modern paint maker, whose laboratory equipment is meticulously marked with milligrams, would be furious, and a new-age practitioner would attach his own esoteric meanings. Meanwhile, modernist painters such as Alberto Burri or Antoni Tàpies never left any treatises on their painting techniques, which were highly complex and were developed through years of wrestling with their material(s). Essentially, they focused on transformations from rawness to purification, but these processes were (intentionally) often silent about the practices of the studio.

A few years ago in Madrid, walking through the labyrinths of the Museo del Prado, I was looking closely at the brightly glowing vermilion robes of the figures in the eighteenth-century Flemish paintings. The red appeared so aching that it seemed to make my eyes sting. The shimmering linseed oil binder made it even more intense. All I could think about at the time was how those velvety drapes had been painted and what the history of the pigment in the paint was. Was it a purified cinnabar mineral, which, when ground, intensified the red? Or was it an alchemical substance formed by the sacred union of mercury and sulphur? The symbolism of the colour did not excite me, and I began to think about what the pigment was made of and how it was prepared. My mind wanders to the complex sequence of actions, the vaults of the boisterous alchemist’s workshops, the roosters laying eggs and the toads hatching them, the basilisks emerging which are later burned, and the ashes that are mixed with the powdered dried blood of a red-haired man.35

Reflecting on the sequence of steps before painting, it becomes obvious that a pigment exists before paint: It is first extracted, crushed, mixed with a binder, and only then does it take the form of paint. However, the pigment has receded into (or rather, has been relegated to) into the shadow of painting. By remaining pure and not bound to the discipline of painting, is the pigment not an independent substance that can tell us more rather than being tied to form? In painting, the pigment’s significance and historical context is muted; it becomes a nameless entity whose particles disperse with the touch of a brush. The pigment’s colour qualities are revealed through its use in technique; the colour has a special ability to vary depending on the binder, the proportion of the ingredients, and the presence of impurities. However, I believe that it would be unjust to reduce the pigment to colour alone or to such properties as translucency or opacity.

I believe that the materiality of painting is its fundamental condition. Painting cannot exist without a material body, while paint is directly dependent on the substance of colour. The harmony or opposition of materials tells a story that remains beneath the surface, which at times conditions the longevity of the painting. The comfortable situation created by the processes of industrialisation has immersed the painter in an amnesic state – it has become convenient not to worry about complex techniques, the rarity of materials, and geographical barriers. A pigment brings with it a history even before it takes form, before it is subjugated to the purpose of depicting. In painting, the pigment’s significance and geological context begins to fade, but its colour qualities are preserved through its use in technique. The technical parameters describe the evolution of painting from prehistoric cave paintings, church frescoes, and icon paintings to the monumental formats of Anselm Kiefer or the objects by Anish Kapoor painted in vantablack. The set of tools used by the painter defines the expression, and while they may mutate in the entanglement of interdisciplinarity, the fundamental conditions are still the same.

The aluminium tube, invented in 1841, became a symbol of detachment from the weight of materials, marking the beginning of plein-air, practiced by the Impressionists. Interestingly, this is often seen as a positive liberation from the materiality of tools; their spectrum narrowed down, and the tube became a container for the reduced history of paint. The material nature of painting began to sink into oblivion, its abandonment began with the negation of tradition, culminating in the practices of the conceptualists and minimalists. The fetish of reductive ideas, forms, and surface colours has cut painting off from its material roots. With the loss of the physical body, it was absorbed by other media. The availability of materials, the convenience, and the modernisation of the paint industry supplied a pretext for no longer worrying about the material origins of painting. Although this is not a firm diagnosis of the death of painting, as A. Danto has recognised,36 it has clearly become disconnected from the material tradition, which has begun to sink into oblivion.

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Pigments and earths are storytellers; I am merely an observer, a cautious listener, who engages with them materially, trying to entangle them into a web of meanings. In between the tiny particles of dust and layers of sediment, their stories rest. It is a matter of reinterpretation, a mastery of knowing the right time and place to leave a poetic stroke. I try to grasp them in a mist, which conceives a space for the mind to wander off into the realm of vanished meanings.

1 Ôkhra – écomusée de l’ocre, Roussillon, Provence, France.

2 The synthetic blue pigment was accidentally discovered in the University of Oregon lab by chemist Mas Subramanian and his student Andrew Smith while developing materials for electronics devices. The Shepherd Color Company, “YInMn Blue | Creating & Supplying Blue Pigments Globally,” accessed December 27, 2022, https://www.shepherdcolor.com/yinmn-blue/.

3 Types of tree and shrub resins used for varnish production.

4 Sophie Mariot-Leduc and Catherine Gardonne, Ocres du Luberon, (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 2010), 58.

5 Mariot-Leduc and Gardonne, 57.

6 Mariot-Leduc and Gardonne, 47.

7 Asian Textile Studies, “Mud Dyeing,” November 4, 2019, http://www.asiantextilestudies.com/mud.html.

8 Pliny, the Elder, Natural History, vol. 6, National Library of Medicine, accessed January 5, 2023, https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-57011150RX6-mvpart.

9 Don Emerson, “Haematite: The Bloodstone,” Preview, no. 191 (December 2017): 43–53, https://doi.org/10.1071/PVv2017n191p43.

10 Umberto Eco, “How Culture Conditions the Colours We See,” in The Communication Theory Reader, ed. Paul Cobley (New York: Routledge, 1996), 170.

11 The descriptions of colours are translated by the author. Gražina Marija Martinaitienė, Audiniai Ir Jų Spalvos Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės Istoriniuose Šaltiniuose (Vilnius: Nacionalinis muziejus Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės valdovų rūmai, 2013).

12 Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color (New York: Penguin Books, 2017).

13 Eco, 149–50.

14 Philip Ball, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (London: Viking, 2001), 263.

15 Johannes Itten, The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993).

16 James Elkins, What Painting Is 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), xix.

17 Elkins, 50.

18 Mark Titmarsh, Expanded Painting: Ontological Aesthetics and the Essence of Colour (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 95.

19 Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican Books, 2018), 37.

20 Bruno Latour, “How Better to Register the Agency of Things,” The Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Yale University, March 6, 2014, https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/l/Latour%20manuscript.pdf.

21 Paul Prudence, Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary (Xylem Books, 2022), 122.

22 M. Elias et al., “The Colour of Ochres Explained by Their Composition,” Materials Science and Engineering: B 127, no. 1 (February 2006): 70–80.

23 Sloan Digital Sky Survey, “The Elements of Life Mapped Across the Milky Way,” January 5, 2017, https://press.sdss.org/the-elements-of-life-mapped-across-the-milky-way-by-sdssapogee/.

24 Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2018), 127-8.

25 Prudence, 79-80.

26 Hugh Tredennick and H. P. Cooke, Aristotle: Categories. On Interpretation. Prior Analytics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 19–23.

27 Nicholas Eastaugh, ed., The Pigment Compendium: A Dictionary of Historical Pigments (Amsterdam; Boston: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2004).

28 Genesis 28:11 (The Holy Bible: New International Version) (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1978).

29 Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14, no. 1 (June 2007): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127.

30 Lawrence Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 37–38.

31 This section was partly written in dialogue with James Elkins (What Painting Is).

32 Titmarsh, 92.

33 Titmarsh, 45.

34 Cennino d’Andrea Cennini, Il Libro Dell’Arte: The Craftsman’s Handbook, trans. Daniel V. Thompson, Jr. (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2016), 7–9.

35 Theophilus, On Divers Arts: The Foremost Medieval Treatise on Painting, Glassmaking and Metalwork, trans. John G. Hawthorne and Cyril Stanley Smith (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2020), 119–20.

36 Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 81–116.