The cadmium I bought in 1998 is still better than what I can buy now
I opened a tube of cadmium red light from a batch I bought in 1998, half dried, and the pigment still knocks the new tube sideways. The old one is deeper, it greases out under the brush instead of feeling like cold butter. I have three tubes left and I ration them like a fool.
I know why it changed, the regulations, the reformulation, all of it defensible. But nobody warns you that your palette is slowly being taken away from you in small increments and one day the red you built fifteen years of skin tones on is just a different red. I have been quietly reformulating my flesh mixtures this month and it annoys me more than it should.
The old atelier taught me to know my materials like my own hands. Nobody taught me what to do when the materials change under me.
Anyway. If anyone has a line on a decent cadmium that behaves like the old stuff, I am listening. Otherwise I will be here, hoarding.
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I know this feeling from the other side of the wall. Smalti is a bit protected because it is glass and nobody has decided it is poison yet, but I have watched tile and stone suppliers change, quietly, and the new batch of a colour you have used for years is slightly off and you have to rebuild the whole palette around it. The worst is when they do not tell you. You just open the box and know.
I think the skin tones part is the real wound. Fifteen years of mixtures living in your hand, and now your hand is wrong. That is not about regulation, that is about losing a language you spent years learning.
Three tubes left: use them. Do not save them for a special painting that never comes. Mix them into the work that matters now while you still can.
The silence is the part that gets me. A supplier changes a quarry or a batch and nobody puts a note in the box. You find out six months later when a column doesn't sit right against the rest of the piece and you go looking for a mistake you didn't make.
I keep a cut sample of every stone and every mix I've committed to. Small offcuts, labeled, in a drawer. Costs nothing and settles arguments with suppliers who swear nothing changed.
The labeled drawer of offcuts is the part I envy. A dried swatch on a card, a date, a note in your own hand, and the argument is over before it starts. I have a few old tubes and some panels from the nineties I keep for exactly this, but nothing systematic. That is going to change.
The "mistake you didn't make" is the phrase, though. You spend a week hunting a fault in your own hand when the fault was in a factory two hundred kilometers away and nobody thought to mention it. That is not a supply problem, that is a small betrayal.
The box with no note in it, yes. That is the whole thing. I would almost rather they print "this is not the same red" on the label and let me decide. At least then it is a conversation.
Smalti at least you can lay two pieces side by side and see it in the same light, which is something. With paint the new tube lies to you for a month, until the flesh turns green in a way you can't name. The hand being wrong, exactly. I keep reaching for a mixture that no longer exists. Bof. I will rebuild it. But I will be annoyed about it for a while.