Squeezed the last of a tube of Naples yellow and felt oddly sentimental
Finished a Naples yellow tube today. That particular brand, LeFranc, they changed the formula a couple years back and it's not the same. The new one is cleaner, more obedient. The old one had something slightly disobedient in it, a greenish undertone that made you work for it but gave skin that living quality no other pale yellow does.
I rolled the empty tube flat and put it in the drawer with the others. I don't know why I keep them. It's not hoarding, I throw everything. But there's maybe forty flattened tubes in there going back fifteen years and I can tell you exactly which painting each one belongs to.
My daughter saw me doing it this morning and said I was like a soldier keeping his shell casings. She's not wrong.
The new tube is waiting in the box. I'll use it. But I got through the whole day avoiding it, mixing my pales with white and cadmium instead, like that's not the same thing at all. All the way to the studio and back I knew I was being ridiculous. Voilà. Tomorrow I'll open it and it'll be fine, it's just paint.
Just felt like noting it somewhere people would understand. The rest of the house thinks I've lost my mind over a tube of paint.
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I understand this feeling very well ji. In my tradition we do not throw away the old colours even when they finish. My mother used to keep her dried up leaves and lumps of natural pigment in a small tin, and when I was a boy I thought it was just her habit. But now I also keep my empty things, the little pots where I mix the rice paste and the ochre from the village soil. Each one is tied to a particular painting, a particular season.
Your tube has memory in it. Forty flattened tubes is not hoarding, it is a record. When you hold one you remember the work, the difficulty, the day. The new formula may be obedient but obedience is not everything. Sometimes the disobedient material gives the better result because it asks something from you. That is how it is with natural colours also, every batch is slightly different and you must adjust, and that is the beauty.
Keep your drawer of tubes with respect. One day someone will ask you about them and you will tell them the story of each one, and that is how a life of work is remembered.
This got me. I do the same thing without even meaning to, I have a little pile of dried-out paint in the lids of old jars and I can't bring myself to toss them. Mine aren't as poetic as your mother's ochre from village soil though, they're just Winsor & Newton tubes from Michaels, ha.
But you're right about the memory part. I have a flattened tube of burnt sienna in my drawer and I can't look at it without thinking of the barn scene I painted three winters ago, took me forever to get the shadows right. The tube is just garbage, but it's not, you know?
Do you work with rice paste a lot? I've seen some painters use it for texture but I've never tried it myself. Curious how you find it with the ochre.
Ha, the ones from Michaels are just as much a record as anything else. It's not the poetics of where the paint came from, it's what you were doing when it dried. Burnt sienna and a shadow problem, that'll stick.
And no, not much rice paste. I know it from workshops, friends who work in that tradition, and I respect it but it's not my language. I'm an oil person through and through. Curious though, what are you doing with it? Because the way you mention it makes me think there's a project in it.
Your mother's tin sounds like the better tradition, honestly. I never thought of the tubes as a record until you said it, but that's exactly what they are. I can unfold one from ten years back and the pigment in the crimp still tells me how I was mixing that month.
There's something about holding the evidence of the work. Not the result, the residue. The new formula tube I finished today felt like it died in a hospital, clean and unsurprising. The old ones came out fighting.