The Artist's Magazine - Anatomy of Art Materials

Dreaming of a Pattinson's White Christmas

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:18:21 GMT

If you had been in Alston, Cumberland, on December 25, 1796, at the home of Thomas and Margaret Pattinson, you would have been witness to a very special occasion. It was Christmas Day. Obviously, as significant as that day would be for many of Alston’s residents, the Pattinson’s had a more impending birth celebration on their minds. Margaret gave birth to a son they named Hugh Lee Pattinson on that Christmas Day. Like many successful people, Hugh would later bring some level of notoriety to the region of Cumberland.

Hugh studied science and formed an interest in chemistry as it related to metallurgy. This was a smart move given that mining would yield metals that required not only physical extraction from the ground, but a variety of processes that separated and purified them. Hugh was not a one-sided adolescent. He organized a debate society and was the driving force in its success. After reading extensively about electricity, he created experiments that surprised and delighted both his friends and adoring mother. Breaking with traditional hobbies and idle pastimes of young people today, Hugh was the proud operator of a furnace located on the third floor of his mother’s house. His sporadic explosions and fires hot enough to melt metals, by today’s standards, would certainly raise the eyebrows of any family’s household insurance agent.

How manufacturers get the lead to turn into a wonderful white pigment becomes something of a mystery. The chemistry of the process gets a bit complicated. Lead rarely presents itself on this planet in a pure form as gold sometimes does. Lead needs to be separated from surrounding rock and purified mechanically. It can be found in relatively rich ore deposits in the minerals called galena, cerussite and anglesite, but it’s also combined with more commonly known metals like copper, zinc and silver. Refinement separates metals from each other and subsequent processing drives off additional impurities or isolates other usable metals to render pure samples.

Hugh Pattinson’s claim to fame comes from the patent he filed for creating a process of separating silver from lead. As stated earlier, lead is usually mixed with a variety of metals. Hugh’s patent described a method of separating silver from lead but historic editorial comments note that the cost of doing the separation was not economical given the amount of energy and time that was needed to extract a small amount of silver.

The traditional process of making lead white pigment is well documented. Sheets or buckles of lead were transformed to lead acetate through exposure to vapors of acetic acid. Heat and carbon dioxide turn the lead acetate into lead carbonate. That chemical process, by a variety of methods, created the lead white pigment artists have used for centuries. It was time consuming and tricky to get the lead to consistently transform into the carbonate form of the metal. Experimenters looked for faster, cheaper ways to make a substantial white colorant that would have the same superior characteristics as lead white. Hugh Pattinson used his knowledge of metallurgy to come up with a traditional lead white substitute.

The documentation of Pattinson’s lead white pigment is somewhat fragmented. The lifespan and popularity of his pigment discovery remains obscure. Pattinson took a different chemical route to create a lead white pigment. He precipitated a solution of chloride and oxide of lead in a hydrated state to create lead oxychloride. It yielded a white pigment with fairly good covering power. Lead oxychloride is a chemical relative of another pigment called Turner’s yellow. As is evident, lead oxychloride is not the same as lead carbonate, the chemical name for lead white pigment.

Turning again to the history of this material, it’s curious that the pigment referred to as Pattinson’s white does not have a date of origin. Guessing that it was invented around the time that Pattinson was in his prime when he was working out the process for separating silver from lead, the approximate date of the invention of Pattinson’s white could have been around 1830. A.H. Church refers to Pattinson’s white in the 1890 edition of The Chemistry of Paints and Painting. But by 1913, Hurst’s A Manual of Painters’ Colours, Oils, and Varnishes refers to lead oxychloride as “now obsolete.”

I’m speculating that Pattinson’s white must have had a fair degree of success since it was marketed for approximately 70 years. However, it must have had some inherent problems since lead carbonate white remained high in production and sales throughout the first half of the 20th century. Lead white sales and production start to diminish only after the acceptance of titanium dioxide as a pigment with superior performance characteristics.

It might be urban folklore to think that once it was discovered that lead white was toxic and harmful to people, a race to find a substitute was initiated. The literature on lead white periodically reminds us that the dangers of lead white were well known. The lack of a suitable replacement with the same performance characteristics and well as a powerful lead production lobby, delayed the changeover from lead-based white paints to titanium and titanium-zinc combinations.

This story doesn’t end with the apotheosis of Hugh Pattinson. They didn’t name Alston’s town square after him, though he did reach a level of celebrity that allowed him the honor of laying the cornerstone of Alston’s city hall in 1857, just one year before he died. His Pattinson’s white paint didn’t have a sustained market, although approximately 70 years of sales isn’t a bad run. His success was the product of a time period when inventing a fledgling industrial process yielded financial growth and security.

Bending Spoons and Breaking the Laws of Physics

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:03:17 GMT

This has been a busy lecture preparation season for me. Most of the summer was spent preparing for talks given at the Savannah College of Art and Design in early October 2008. The school is wonderful, and the professors could not have been more welcoming and open to discussion on a variety of topics. However in meeting with students, some intriguing ideas were exchanged in our conversations.

Students at Savannah, and any other art school, are in the processing of finding their own niche, staking claim to their personal voice in artistic expression. In their experimentation, they may stumble upon an art material or industrial fabrication that works to meet their needs. It might be a type of paint that they modify to perform a certain way or a substrate that acts to their liking. After investing a lot of time in working with these “out of the mainstream” materials, they attend one of my lectures. I tend to scare them with stories and pictures of what can happen when artists don’t think through the long-term problems and issues regarding inherent vice.

I define "inherent vice" as elements within the physical makeup of a material that will cause it to change in appearance, fail to maintain long-term integrity or compromise the existence of an object. As art objects age, the potential for degradation of any materials rises.This is especially true as new, industrial materials and/or combinations of commercial and artists’ materials and experiments with mixing various formulations enter the art realm.

The vast array of products found at a home improvement store can be used to make art, but will they hold together for a reasonable amount of time and sustain the visual appearance an artist intended when the piece was fabricated? Some of my conservator colleagues will say, let artists make whatever they want, however they want, out of whatever artists want. My counter argument to that is as follows. If you don’t do a bit of “homework” and think through the fabrication process, the mixing of potentially disparate or incompatible materials and how they will become integrated as an art object, you might doom them to a premature death. I am not a firm believer in the notion of trusting artists to use whatever they want, however they want for one main reason. In talking to artists I find that in many cases they select materials impulsively, without thought as to how they will work together or hold up to the effects of aging. Mature artists may have very sound reasons for selecting materials and wishing to exploit the effects of the interaction between disparate products. They may even select a material for its symbolic meaning. I respect that notion and applaud it. However, lots of artist will take shortcuts and skip basic research into what would be best to use to achieve an effect and maintain the look and feel for an appreciable length of time. Experiment all you want, but don’t expect your potential buyers to support the brunt of your cutting edge work as the piece you create melts or crumbles before their eyes. To use a color related analogy, we would not want the folks who apply the highly technical paint application to the car we buy to “go creative” one day and add something strange to the coating mixture because they thought it would look really cool. That might be fine if you want to give away the car, but if I am paying for it, I expect the paint to perform over a long period of time without failing.

Let’s go back to the world of art students starting out with building their portfolios and satisfying their class assignments. I see so many of them work with materials that they have no idea as to how they will perform over time. Some even pick paints or substrates that are made with products that are known to be incompatible with paints or adhesives they are using. However, they like the way the stuff looks. They did not pick a clear sheet of acrylic glazing material from the hardware store because it symbolized the death of natural products in what is an endless sea of artificial, chemical confusion. They selected it because it was on sale and rubber cement mixed with plastic beads they spread about the surface of the acrylic sheet looks good. Using materials that we know will change in appearance fairly quickly will have a dramatic impact on how their artwork will be viewed and interpreted. Their artists' statements should anticipate the acrylic changing as the solvents interact with the plastic. They should preemptively comment on the brown appearance of the rubber cement even though at the time the art was created the adhesive was clear and colorless. A few better-planned choices made with some thought could have saved them from the inevitable changes that would take place by using materials that change so drastically in a short period of time. Many artists however continue to struggle to attempt to perform the equivalent of the mentalist Kreskin and bend spoons before our eyes. You can try to defy physics, but in the end, physics always wins.

Some Thoughts on Making Art

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:42:33 GMT

I was passing by an office building under construction and suddenly an idea came to mind that relates to making works of art. When a building is under construction, do you think the architect and the construction company gather together to figure out the minimal amount of effort and poorest quality materials that will be needed to assemble a building? Construction firms could build a structure, with the thought that after they finish the project, someone else can be hired to fix the deficiencies in the quality of the materials used and the poor techniques they employed to assemble the components. Just get it to look right and hope it holds together long enough for the checks to clear the bank. Fortunately, a sense of integrity, reputation, compliance to building codes, as well as a healthy fear of legal action, govern the construction of most of the commercial buildings erected in the United States today.

Why is it that many artists ignore the notion of integrity, reputation, and fear of legal action? I skipped the building codes because they don’t apply, but perhaps that would not be a bad idea. Many art schools today impart no sense of the need for “building codes” for works of art. Some schools don’t even make it an academic challenge by confronting students with the exercise of creating works of art that appear to use materials with inherent vice but are really very sound and stable.

Suppose you were fixated on making an artistic statement where the focus of your work was the typical American hamburger and its potential ill effects on the health and well being of the population. A painted image of a hamburger just wouldn't be enough. You would want it to appear to be a real and tangible object that exudes the essence of hamburger on a bun with all the extras. The simple, short-term answer would be to obtain a real hamburger and mount it, as appropriate, to your artwork. The long-term outcome is easy to figure out. The fresh, glistening, juicy hamburger will, in short order, be reduced to a blue-green, furry biohazard. This could be your intention, but you are likely to encourage the wrath of anyone who has to deal with your artwork professionally——from the gallery director who will have to cope with the byproducts of the deterioration process to the hazmat team that will be called in at some point to deal with the new life form that has established itself on your artwork. Nobody will be happy. Either way, your artwork will be delivered to a “suitable” exhibition space if you find that a garbage dumpster is an appealing alternate art gallery. Unless you are as rich as Warren Buffett and/or have a valued reputation as an artist, nobody is going to put up with your deteriorating hamburger nonsense.

Now let’s go back to something more realistic and equally applicable. Why should artists be afforded the luxury to make objects without thought as to their longevity, leaving the difficult task of maintaining the artist's intent to a future generation of conservators? Conservators will have enough gainful employment treating the fairly stable, natural deterioration of materials found in works of art, without having the challenge of holding together a totally ill-planned nightmare.

As I often find now, it is all a matter of economics. Will a poorly made work of art be worth the money needed to keep it looking the way an artist intended? No standard answer exists. However, unless you, as an artist, have a devoted following, your “brilliant” idea to paint with dry pigment mixed with vegetable shortening may not make it to a museum wall, when a curator and acquisition committee looks at how much it will cost to preserve a painting that is currently “wet” and will NEVER dry.

My Somewhat Secret Life

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:40:53 GMT

It seems I am always in the process of getting myself into projects that consume a huge amount of time. I am drawn to them like moths to a candle. It doesn't mean that I am not thinking about art and art materials. Those thoughts are always with me. It’s just a matter of sitting down and writing them out. Currently I'm trying to figure out how to use the combined 80 minutes that I sit on a commuter train each day of the workweek to get these thoughts out.

So let’s catch up on what is going on right now. Within the last year I became the chairman of the subcommittee of the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) D01.57 group on Artists’ Materials.This is the group that creates standards for art materials and whose claim to fame is the mandatory standard D2436 that is found on almost every art and craft material around. I even saw it recently on a kit for coloring Easter eggs! I will comment from time to time on relevant issues related to the important work this subcommittee performs. We are headed for a meeting in Reno, NV and the National Art Materials Trade Association show late in April.

For those of you who are dedicated readers of The Artist's Magazine, I provide entries for the “Ask the Experts” column. Some days I really question that “Expert” word in the title. The more I learn about the art materials world, the more I realize that I have no clue as to what is happening. (Keep this a secret. Don’t let my editor know about this! Actually, all the editors involved with the writing I do work very hard to keep me looking good. My thanks go out to them.) The questions posed by The Artist's Magazine's readers are challenging, especially one that I'll address shortly in an upcoming issue on the use of zinc in oil paints. That answer will spark some interesting discussions.

That would be enough stuff to keep anyone busy but, as a glutton for punishment, I have the truly thankless job of serving as treasurer and board member of the Mid-Atlantic Plein Air Painters Association. It’s a great organization and the opportunities are only limited by the imagination and hard work that its committee coordinators can produce. I can only wonder what we might do if we had unlimited time to put toward running the organization.

I have had a passion for prints ever since I went to undergraduate and graduate school and had nearly free reign to open drawers of the print collections of the university art galleries that I volunteered for during my days as a student. Luscious velvety black mezzotints, the fine lines and subtle plate tones of drypoint, and engraved images were all intriguing. Right now I am pouring through articles, books and websites in the hopes of learning how to make some of these beautiful images. I am so serious that I even bought an etching press and nearly killed myself lugging it into my house. How could something so small weigh so much? I have yet to pull a print but I might share one of my disasters with you in the future.

That about brings you up to date. Spring is coming soon and the trees are showing their characteristic red tinge. Soon it will be both prime allergy and plein air painting season. I will be ready to charge outside as soon as I see the first robin in the yard.

Paints for a Palette::Musicians for an Orchestra

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:48:01 GMT

So, a lot of you took the title of this discussion, "Paints for a Desert Island," seriously. I meant it only as a reference to an old radio program; nevertheless, it made for an interesting theme. If I'd called this entry “Vacation in the Mountains” or “Journey to the Amazon,” would the palette have been different? My point is that I want you to think of a scenario where you can’t anticipate what subject matter you will paint but are restricted as to what tubes of colors you can bring along.

I really like analogies to music when talking about paint because I want the discussion to be about feelings and perceptions—rather than numbers or concrete amounts. So here is another musical analogy. How many musicians would it take to make a group sound like a symphony orchestra? Imagine you are seated in the audience with your back facing the stage but the conductor keeps calling in string, wind and brass and percussion players who join the group and pick up with the rest of those already playing a classical piece. You get to yell stop when you think it sounds like the volume and depth you expect from a symphony orchestra. How few or, looking at it another way, how many people do you need before the overall sound feels like a complete orchestra? Music experts, please don’t scrutinize this too carefully. I realize that various symphonic pieces need multiple players to fulfill the parts written for a score, so a small number of players would not be able to provide all that is needed. However, you get the general idea.

The same hold true with paints. How many colors would it take to assure that in nearly any situation you could have the right pigments to create anything that is required?

I really liked the answers you gave. Many followed all the conventional rules even without conferring with each other, although the last few entries could have been influenced by reading those entries already posted. Most of you came up with the classical palette choices that artists have assembled for a long time. Purposefully or not, lots of you selected warm/cool primary palettes.

Other observations:

Some of you selected primary palettes of warm and cool, but I noticed that both blue colors listed were warm. Ultramarine and cobalt blue have lots of red reflectance, making them both warm colors. Selecting a cool blue like cerulean or phthalocyanine provides the counterpart to the warm hues of ultramarine or cobalt.

I was interested in which yellows were selected. Many of you place a lot of emphasis on all the other primary colors but yellow. Perhaps that works for watercolorist, but lacking good warm and cool yellow colors in oil paints can be quite a handicap. The palette with quinacridone gold brought this issue of selecting a broad range of yellow colors to mind.

I sensed that most of you don’t use the palettes you describe so using the colors you choose would be a new experience. Try them and see if they fulfill your wishes.

Some of you cheated a bit and went over the 8 colors allowed. That’s fine. Our astute
color police stationed at the airport will confiscate your extra choices.

Why do some of you apologize for using earth colors? I thought black would be annoying to most of you, but some focused on avoiding earth colors as though they were evil. Go ahead and paint the way you wish and make earth colors out of primary pigments. I suppose I am cheap, but I find it annoying to use expensive cadmium colors to make earth colors. So many earth colors are beautiful, transparent hues that can add so much to a painting.

Food for Further Thought: Look at your palette and not only think about warm verses cool primaries, but examine the colors you might use to create a transparent versus opaque palette of primary colors. It gets a bit complicated because you could wind up with warm and cool transparent yellows and warm and cool opaque yellows, etc. That would make up a palette of 12 primary colors alone with no secondary hues. However, think about how to play transparent off of opaque colors to achieve fantastic effects.

One question was posed on making a good transparent violet. Several ways exist but the main thing is that both red and blue choices must be transparent to achieve this mixture. Try alizarin crimson with ultramarine blue or quinacridone red with phthalocyanine blue for a higher chroma violet. For variations experiment with other transparent organic red hues like perylene red or pyrrol red with a transparent blue to see if the hue is appropriate for your work.

Finally, the first three entries will be receiving a one -year subscription to The Artist’s Magazine. My choice for the 4th subscription goes to Dorothy Riley’s entry. This palette, while following the warm cool primary layout, boldly reaches into cadmium yellow deep and Prussian blue to expand the range of the palette. Mixing cadmium yellow deep with a citron (lemon) yellow can achieve a wide range of warm yellow hues.

Want to read more about artists' palettes? Look for an upcoming article (April 08) in The Artist’s Magazine called “Palettes of the Masters,” where I'll discuss the palette choices of several artists who selected colors that provide us with a wonderful tool for learning about materials and techniques.

Fearlessly Making Paint

Wed, 09 May 2007 18:47:46 GMT

I have a keen interest in how things are put together. When I was a child, my parents treated me to mechanical toys like tractors, space ships and boats that were made out of metal and had small tabs that bound each piece of the toy together. Using a small screwdriver, I could pry open the tabs and disassemble the toy into its component parts. Once my father brought home a tractor that had a transparent engine with pistons that you could see moving up and down as the tractor moved about the floor. It took me about 45 minutes to take the entire thing apart. I was desperate to see what made the pistons go up and down.

I’ve carried that curiosity about how things are made into adulthood. I’m fascinated to know how paints are made. While some art material manufacturers may have believed that my probing questions were aimed at exposing the secrets of making paints so that I could go out and start a company of my own, I was merely interested in knowing how the paint was made. (Note: After asking enough questions about paint manufacturing, I believe you would have to be insane to start to make paint today. It is expensive to undertake, fraught with potential problems and comes without much support.

On a number of trips to New York I followed an art materials “pilgrimage route” that started on Canal Street with a visit to Pearl Paint (www.pearlpaint.com). Moving up through lower Manhattan, I found three art materials stores in sight of each other. David Davis Fine Art Materials (www.daviddavisnyc.stores.yahoo.net), Kremer Pigments (www.kremer-pigmente.de/homee.htm) and Vasari Classic Artists’ Oil Colors (http://www.shopvasaricolors.com) were all within a hundred yards of each other. The art materials walk would conclude on Third Avenue with a visit to New York Central Art Supply (www.nycentralart.com).

I met Gail, the owner of Vasari Classic Artists’ Oil Colors several years ago the first time I made the “pilgrimage” in lower Manhattan. She told me about the paints and had a unique method of discussing the qualities of each pigment. She had a light gray plastic laminate table and mixed paint on the surface to show the working properties of the colors she discussed. I was mesmerized by her knowledge of pigments and the color combinations she produced. Colors I never considered using were transformed by mixing them with other paints to produce a luscious array of hues. It opened my mind to the vast number of combinations that exists for making colors that artist can select. It made me realize that palettes are very personal and based on ways we individually map out our color space.

Vasari uses a simple approach to making paint. However, the selection of colors and suggestions for mixing are far from simple. Vasari avoids avoid the use of fillers and dryers and make paint in the same fashion as had been done by 16th- through19th-century color men. Vasari basically uses alkali refined linseed oil and powder pigment to produce their product line. Vasari paints contain a substantial amount of pigment, and they carefully select hues from a wide range of pigments available in order to obtain colors that help the artist to avoid making muddy, dull mixtures.

Paint makers have no manual that provides them instruction for making paint. They learn through a combination of trial and error along with some technical support by the pigment and /or binder manufacturer. All of the manufacturers today had to learn to make paint by some very generic formulas along with a lot of experimentation. This is the part where I refer to bravery triumphs over insanity and allows the paint maker to make a living selling paint.

Since our first meeting I’ve grown to appreciate the personal vision that Vasari puts into the oil paints they make. They provide another avenue for artists to explore. The diversity of personal visions is what makes the artistic community so great, and it’s the diversity of personal visions each manufacturer embodies—engineered into the products available to artists—that make this industry so interesting.

Perhaps you have a story to share about a personal experience with a paint manufacturer. The industry has so many choices for artists. I’ve had marvelous experiences using and talking to the folks who make Gamblin Artists Colors (www.gamblincolors.com), Winsor & Newton (http://www.winsornewton.com), Golden Artist Acrylics (www.goldenpaints.com) and many others. Each has a part to contribute to making the world of artists’ materials. I will talk about each in future Web log entries.