WHICH?Pigment Characteristics In my hippy-happy store in Byron Bay, Australia, I regularly get a request for “natural” pigments, to which I sometimes reply cheekily: do you mean natural as in made from arsenic? mercury? copper? lead? or perhaps sulphur? These have all been used to make pigments and are found naturally on the planet! But that’s generally…
Tag: art-history
5) Pigments from the industrial colour revolution of “The Long Nineteenth Century” (1798-1914) and beyond
WHEN?Pigments in HistoryThe fifth circle “Nothing is perhaps more peculiar than the process by which one obtains Prussian Blue, and it must be owned that, if chance had not taken a hand, a profound theory would be necessary to invent it” humbly admitted in 1762, the chemist Jean Hellot. If we discard then the discovery…
4) Renaissance pigments to… the eve of the Industrial Revolution
WHEN?Pigments in HistoryThe fourth circle You might be surprised at the number of centuries/art periods I have chosen to group into this circle. Yet, compared to the astonishing explosion of new pigments in the previous centuries, the Renaissance/Baroque/Classical/Romantic periods can hardly claim but a handful. I’m not debating the number of masterpieces produced during those…
in bed with mona lisa 