R&F Handmade Paints

Kingston HS class

Kingston High School, just a couple of blocks away from R&F, has a vibrant art department, due in large part to its inspired and dedicated teachers. They bring their students here for encaustic workshops, and the students are welcome to come back and work on their own in the workshop room.

Students in workshop room at R&F

Several years ago art teacher Lara Giordano partnered with chemistry teacher Christine Marmo to help make chemistry relevant to art students. Shuttling between science lab and studio room, the students learn the chemistry behind paper, pigments, dyes, paints, binders, metals, and clays, which gives them a deep material understanding of printmaking, papermaking, painting, photography, ceramics, jewelry making, art conservation, and chemical hazards in art. This understanding gives them life-long tools to master the various mediums.

Christine Marmo and Lara Giordano

The students gain a full understanding of color as they study electromagnetic radiation, prisms, and the refraction of white light into the different wavelengths of colors. In order to learn about papermaking, for example, they study the intermolecular forces of hydrogen bonding between cellulose and water. Soil chemistry relates to ceramics, acid-base and oxidation-reduction reactions relates to photography, and the study of the body – the vulnerability of the respiratory, circulatory, and nervous systems, as well as of skin and eyes – relates to understanding the chemical hazards of art materials.

I often wonder what such a class would have meant to me 45 years ago when I was a disaffected high school student flunking chemistry (and not much better in other subjects) but reading Max Doerner’s The Materials of the Artist to learn how to make egg tempera and explore the properties of oil paint. It would have made chemistry relevant to my obsession with art. It would have all made sense to me, and I would not have had to wait until I was making paint to finally appreciate the underlying science of making pictures.

When Lara and Christine asked me to give my talk on the chemistry and history of painting materials to their class, I was thrilled and intrigued by the challenge of simplifying this information for young artists. I’ve given this talk to professional artists and college students, but these kids don’t take second place in sophistication, and now and then I get questions that makes me pause.

The class was at 8:00 in the morning! (Who, after all, wants to learn chemistry at a reasonable hour?) The first day we explored what is color (how color is not a thing by itself but a chemical that reacts to light), the chemistry of pigments and dyes (what’s the difference?), the components of pigments (how, for example, cobalt blue is made from black cobalt oxide and silvery aluminum), and the history of pigments from ancient times to modern. All of this gets jammed into the 40-minute class period, so it’s just a sketch. But, still, we cover a lot of ground.

sample-jars

The second day we discussed different mediums and their relationship to pigments – how refraction and surface characteristics of the paint film affect the hue of a pigment. A pigment has a variety of hues and opacities depending on what medium it is in. Pigment in aqueous mediums (distemper, watercolor, egg tempera) is more opaque and lighter and brighter than pigment in oil or wax, which tends to be deeper and more translucent.

Richard showing blue

Cobalt blue pigment in different mediums

It’s a real challenge, but I love it every time I do it.

Cynthia Knott, Naiad, oil, encaustic, and metallic on linen, 40"x74", 2005

We are always thrilled when one of our customers gets well-deserved recognition. The latest instance was Cynthia Knott from eastern Long Island who recently received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in October. (more…)

Self Portrait with Striped hat

We are very saddened to hear about the death of our good friend, Richard Merkin.  Richard was a revered teacher at Rhode Island School of Design and a long time illustrator for the New Yorker magazine. We knew Richard since the early 1990s. He was much more than a customer to us. He loved our Pigment Sticks, and we greatly loved the work he did with them. Those of you who like our Cerulean Blue Extra Pale can thank Richard for that. It was his urging that prompted us to make it.

Taxi Dancing

Richard’s solo show in the Gallery at R&F in 2002 filled the room with whimsy and romance. But our love of his work is as personal as it is professional. One of his paintings, which is in our permanent collection at R&F, is an uproariously comical portrait that he did of Jim and me many years ago. It is typical of the sharp observation and sly wit that characterized his work.

Richard and Jim

The same year that he had his show here, he came to teach a special Pigment Stick workshop.  His gregarious nature and delightful personality was infectious and the students had a fabulous, productive time.   He made a lasting impression not only on them but on the whole staff at R&F.

There will be two encaustic demonstrations happening on Saturday May 30th:

Mary Black "Seeds"

(more…)

The thing about color that every artist comes to understand is that colors do not exist by themselves in the abstract.  (more…)

A pigment is just a chemical that, due to its chemistry, absorbs certain wavelengths of light and reflects those wavelengths it doesn’t absorb. What it reflects is its color. Sounds simple enough. But when you think about it, it’s almost surreal that the chemicals that compose a color in no way look like it. (more…)

from Medieval Illuminators & Their Methods of Work, J. Alexander, Yale U.P.

Here’s an interesting anecdote that I tell in my materials talk about pigments and mediums.

Red lead, which is made from roasting white lead, was one of the principle reds of ancient times. Its color is similar to vermilion, and, in fact, the names for them were often interchanged. But by Medieval times, the Latin word minium referred solely to red lead. So why is the Latin word for a pigment that has long since disappeared from the artist’s palette of any interest to us?

Well, in the painting of Christian manuscript illuminations and even in the Muslim paintings of Persia, red was a color of great importance, and the pigment was often red lead.

In religious manuscripts, directions or other important wording was painted in red to distinguish it from the rest of the text. This was called rubric.

from Medieval Illuminators & Their Methods of Work, J. Alexander, Yale U.P.

But red also signalled important figures or other aspects of the illumination. Because of this, even though the illumination employed other colors as well, the act of painting it was called miniare, to paint in red lead.

We get the word miniature from miniare. Miniature came to mean “small” only because the illuminations, like the Persian paintings, were small in scale.

from Artists' Pigments, vol.1, R. Feller et al., Cambridge U.P.