Welcome to my weblog,  an opportunity for me to extend beyond the confines of the “Ask the Experts” column in The Artist’s Magazine. I plan to discuss, in a casual but informative way, topics that interest and concern you, such as art materials, techniques and the history of art materials. 

By way of introduction, I’m responsible for a large collection of art materials in a major American museum. My responsibility in managing this collection is to provide future generations of scientists and conservators pristine samples and accompanying trade literature that will help reveal the chemical and working properties of art materials in use today. My association with this work sparked an interest in researching the history of pigments, the function of both common and rare art materials, and the unsung history of people who have made a contribution to and have had an impact on the art materials world. These people aren’t household names. They’ve been relegated to a footnote in history, but their presence is still felt and with us in unusual ways.

I’m always amazed by the extent to which artists will go to root out information about how artists in the past used materials. Sometimes these contemporary artists mistranslate or misinterpret the information in ways that are both comic and sad. We could fill a book with the myths concerning artists' techniques! Each generation picks up what it believes are the standard textbooks and educates itself on the inaccurate knowledge published by the experts of that day. These experts may have meant well, but were restricted by the technical research capacity of the time and by the lack of scientific support by a body of experts in the field. When I first encountered some of the sources of these fabrications, I got quite annoyed that myths kept creeping into the working vocabulary of artists. Now I just think of it as job security! 

Today, we have conservation scientists and conservators throughout the globe studying art materials and techniques. This corpus of knowledge has slowly revealed both common and startling discoveries, and I look forward to sharing them with you.