Page 25 - Artist Materials Advisor

The sad news about the recent conviction of Odd Nerdrum for tax evasion made me think about the merchantability of paintings. The 67-year-old Norwegian-born artist was accused of failing to pay taxes on €1.8 million of taxable income from sales between 1998–2002, just before he became an Icelandic citizen. The court defined the crime as aggravated fiscal fraud because the artist “put significant work into hiding his assets, especially by placing a large quantity of money in a safety deposit box.”

Watercolor represents to me at least a purity of form simple pigment on paper. Nothing to hide the pigment, and barely enough of something to hold the pigment to the paper. There are a handful of pigments that I wanted to expand into my watercolor pallet.

The British Library has renovated the search functions for their Online Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. It is worthwhile investigating this vast collection of manuscripts.

For some years, I have been studying the palettes of medieval and Renaissance painters and, with many of the same pigments available to me, have started to reproduce their palettes, many of which are depicted in portraits and self-portraits described in painting treatises. This work has led me to more clearly see the tonal and color arrangements in the work of the old masters, which I will be publishing at Natural Pigments.

Harley believes that the English word pink referred to a pseudo-lake pigment, differentiating it from lake pigments, for which the English word lake described. Some of the treatises cited in another article describe depositing the dye on alum or chalk. This differs from the process used to make lake pigments, where the dye is precipitated on freshly made aluminum hydroxide. Interestingly, aluminum hydroxide is made by dissolving alum or aluminum sulfate in water and then precipitating it in a chemical reaction with an alkali, such as soda ash or pearl ash, by adding this alkali dissolved in water to the first solution. Aluminum hydroxide precipitates from the solution as a powder, gel, or horny mass, depending upon the temperature and pH of the solutions. This procedure is quite different from the treatises for making Dutch pink.

No manufacturer I know will disclose information about additives because they view it as proprietary information. Natural Pigments and our brand of artists' oils, Rublev Colours, have eliminated this problem by not including any stabilizing or dispersing additives. Hence there is nothing to disclose except for the pigment and vehicle. We believe transparency and disclosure are essential issues for professional artists creating artworks that they expect to have some degree of longevity. We readily disclose ingredients in our products to assist artists in their creative work.

Glycerin (also spelled glycerine and also called glycerol) is a humectant and plasticizer ingredient in commercial watercolors today, but it is not always an ingredient in commercial watercolors. An examination of watercolor paints from the late 18th and early 19th century reveals that glycerin was not a plasticizer and humectant in pan watercolors (called 'cake' colors in that period). For example, Rudolph Ackermann used crystal sugar melted in water as the plasticizer and humectant for many colors. In some cases, the recipes called for vinegar!

The lead white pigment used in lead white artists' oil paint (often called flake white) is a modern process of lead white with fine particle size. What is the difference between modern lead white in today's artist colors and flake white used by the old masters and artists before the 20th century?

What are your thoughts on best practices for oiling out between layers and when the painting is finished? What oil do you suggest? What about varnishing instead?

Jacques Maroger claims that Rubens limited his colors to little more than brown, black, white, and red. He states, “But from a distance, one has the illusion of perceiving blues, greens, violets... The greatest colorists have always obtained the maximum brilliance and vibration with a minimum of colors.” We examine the palette Rubens used throughout his career in the 17th century.