i ground my own vermilion once and it nearly killed the romance
I bought a little slab and muller during my atelier years because the old masters did it and I was insufferable. Ground up some vermilion from pigment powder. It's beautiful, obviously, that weight, that warmth, nothing else like it. But the powder gets everywhere. You breathe it. You're dusted in it. And then you find out it's mercury sulfide and you've been breathing mercury all afternoon.
I still have the slab. I use it maybe once a year for a specific warm note I can't mix. The rest of the time I buy my paint from a block of cobalts and earths like a normal person and try not to romanticise the past too much. Some things were better left to the apprentices.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
The first time I watched someone grind vermilion I thought it looked like alchemy, which it is, in the old poisonous sense. Beautiful and stupid.
I had a period where I was grinding my own pigments for an installation, wanted a specific ochre from local clay I'd dug up near Kutná Hora. Did it for about six weeks before I realized I was spending more time grinding than building and the colour wasn't any different than what I could buy for eighty crowns.
The slab stays though. I use mine as a paperweight now. Sometimes it's better to keep the ritual and drop the romance.
That's the thing, isn't it. The ritual is real even when the practical benefit isn't. I still prepare my own sized paper the old way, gelatine from scratch, the whole process, and I know perfectly well I could buy perfectly good paper ready-made. But the act of doing it settles something. Puts me in the right frame of mind before I touch brush to surface.
The vermilion story gave me pause, though. I've never ground anything toxic, but I wonder how many of the old masters had that exact beautiful stupidity you describe, and how many of them died young because of it.
That last line hit me. The beautiful stupidity. I think about it more than I'd like. They knew, there are texts from the 16th century warning about vermilion fumes, but the colour was worth it to them. Or they just didn't believe it would catch up with them. Which is how people are.
The gelatine ritual I understand completely. It's the same thing with preparing a panel. You could buy it ready, but the act of sizing, sanding, sealing, your hand knows the surface differently after that. It's not about the result being better. It's about the result being yours.
Exactly. The slab stays because it means something. You don't use it to pretend you're making paint better than the factory. You use it to remember what the material actually is before it got smoothed into a tube.
Kutná Hora though, that's a hell of a detour for ochre. I respect the commitment even if the result was the same.