We recently had a 10 day school break for my children between terms and we were off on a road trip to visit two places that are special to us as a family. I knew that I would not be able to take a break from my research with the end of our unit drawing closer. So along came my trusty old art crate on wheels, filled to the brim with art materials, research books, earth pigment jars and organic inks as well as clay…
I always take my crate along when we go on holiday and most of the time it comes back unopened as I can’t seem to be creative with a lot of distraction and noise around me. Often the most I will do during the holiday are art projects with my kids. With a lot of hope for achieving more than this, the crate was at my feet even as we drove. I got quite a bit of reading done and of course I could not keep myself from constantly seeing potential earth pigments in rocks, clays and sea shells. I was particularly desperate to find a green pigment to add to the warm pallet of pigments I had found so far.
The first stop was a beautiful fig farm were we rented a restored farm house where there was no electricity, a lot of wildlife and only paraffin lamps. It was the perfect setting to immerse my senses in nature. One afternoon when half of my family fell asleep on the porch, I took my two youngest kids for a walk. We followed the sound of a nearby stream until we found a river an the valley nearby. It didn’t take me long to notice the different colour rocks and I started scratching to see if they were soft. The kids copied me and soon we had 2 hours of fun with rocks and colour. And we even found GREEN! A grayish green. I was in awe! Here is a short documentation of our experience. I posted two of the same (one smaller in one actual size video) just in case once did not work well:
After our stay at the farm, we were off to the seaside village of Stilbay were we always go. On our way there we drove through a beautiful canyon and there I picked up more rocks. And I found some more greenish tints! YEahy!
Another interesting sight that caught my eye was the bright green-yellow substance on the cliffs as we drove away from the farm. It was almost neon. I took some and want to see if I can find some information about it and see if a pigment can be made. It must be a type of rock lichen. This is what it looked like:
Off to Stilbay we drove. Stilbay is a place near to my heart and have spent holidays here since I was s child. I was VERY pleasantly surprised to come across some MoRE green stone. Who knew! I felt very lucky and picked up quite a lot to take home. I also mixed it with some linseed oil and tested it on gesoed paper and on shellaced paper. I think it came out great and can’t wait to use it in my artwork soon! This green was slightly lighter and this is what the pigment looks like:
I also picked up some shells to see if a green or purple could be achieved:
Even tough I didn’t get to do as much drawing as I wanted to, I was very pleased to bring back my finds and that I was able to get green.
I feel like I will take a break from sourcing and processing pigments now and focus on creating some artwork from them. Using the pigment as a paint and charcoal for drawing and ALSO using the pigment as a ceramic slip. I am busy making some ceramic containers and wells for all my pigments and inks on the pottery wheel. I am interested to see how my foraged pigments will respond as a slip and conceptually bind my 2D and 3D work. I feel that the work I have done in this unit has brought me closer to nature, learning so much and in such an intimate way.
Truly it is such a wonderfully immersive experience!