The pigment I can no longer buy honestly

I had a small crisis in the studio yesterday that I'm still turning over. I've used genuine rose madder for years, mixed it myself from the lake pigment. It's fugitive, of course, everyone knows that, and yet there's a particular milky transparency to it that the modern quinacridone substitutes simply do not replicate. I've been rationing my last tube like it's contraband.

Then I stopped and asked myself what I'm actually doing. I teach students that botanical illustration is about permanence, about recording a specimen faithfully so it outlives the plant. And here I am, hoarding a pigment that will fade in thirty years, putting it in paintings meant to last centuries. It's a bit absurd. Sentiment dressed up as craft.

I've decided to use it up properly, on small private studies that are mine alone, and switch the teaching and commissioned work over to the substitutes. The colour will be close enough, and nobody will be lied to about permanence. But I do find I'm oddly reluctant to open that final tube. It feels like saying goodbye to a colleague, which is a ridiculous thing to feel about a pigment.

Am I alone in this, or do other painters keep one obsolete material around out of loyalty rather than logic?

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Inês Costa·1h

I understand the hoarding instinct. I have the same problem with certain papers, the ones that hold the cyanotype wash just right, and I know one day they won't make them the same way. There is something almost superstitious about it, keeping a tube as if it could hold a moment in amber.

But the thing you said about teaching permanence, that stopped me too. I think honesty in materials is part of it. I work in a process that is famously, gloriously blue and also famously impermanent, and at some point I made peace with the idea that my prints will fade. There is an honesty in that. The sea changes, and the work should be allowed to change with it.

Maybe the milky transparency is not in the pigment at all. Maybe it is in the time you spent with the old tube. I don't mean that as a comfort, I mean it as a question I ask myself often. Whether the material carries the memory or we do.

Inês Costa·57m

That bit about making peace with the fading, I feel it in my bones. We spend so much effort trying to make things last and then one day you stand back and think, but the plant didn't last either. The specimen fades, the paper fades, the light that made the print fades. Maybe the print is honest because it fades the same way everything else does.

I still hoard the paper though. So I'm not sure the peace is complete. But I think there's room for both, the superstition and the acceptance.

Margaret HsuOP·17m

That last line is what I keep coming back to. The peace and the superstition can sit in the same drawer, so to speak. I suspect they always have. Every painter who has ever loved a fugitive color has known exactly this contradiction, and we keep doing it anyway. There is something honest about not being fully reconciled. It means you still care about the work as a thing made by a hand, not just as a piece of information.

And I will not hear a word against hoarding paper. That is not superstition. That is foresight.

Margaret HsuOP·45m

The honesty point is the part that keeps circling back to me. I've built a whole teaching philosophy around permanence, and I think that's right for the discipline, but it's not the whole truth. The plant fades too. Every specimen I've ever painted has outlived its subject, but it won't outlive everything. There is a kind of arrogance in pretending otherwise.

I've never quite made peace with that myself, though I admire that you have. Perhaps that's the difference between our mediums. The cyanotype admits its own impermanence from the start; watercolor likes to pretend it's here to stay. Mine is the more dishonest medium, I suspect.

You said the sea and then stopped. I'd like to know the rest of that thought.

Sol Reyes·53m

The rationing, I know exactly what that is. I have one tube of this old cadmium yellow that I won't touch because when it's gone it's gone, and it's the exact color of my grandmother's kitchen walls that I keep trying to get back to. It's not even about the paint at that point, you know? It's about the thing the color carries.

But the permanence thing really got me. I paint people and feelings mostly, and none of that lasts either. The person fades, the feeling fades, and I'm just putting charcoal down trying to pin something that's already leaving. Maybe that's the whole point. Maybe the work isn't supposed to outlive the thing, it's supposed to be the proof that the thing was here at all. The fading isn't a failure, it's just the work being honest about what it is.

Can you still get the lake pigment at all, or is it truly gone? Because if there's a batch hiding somewhere I want to know where before it disappears too 😭

Margaret HsuOP·21m

The cadmium yellow and your grandmother's kitchen walls, now that resonates in a way I was not expecting. That is precisely it. It stops being about the pigment and becomes about the thing it holds, which no identical color on a swatch card will ever carry. I suspect we are both really hoarding a memory rather than a tube of paint.

And I take your point about permanence, truly. I have never painted a person, charcoal or otherwise, but I have painted a great many plants that were gone by the time the washes dried. There is a kind of honesty in admitting the record is always provisional. Perhaps the discipline is not about outlasting the subject at all, but about marking the moment it was seen properly, once, by someone paying close enough attention. That feels like a version of permanence I can live with, even if the pigment itself fades.