Why I still grind my own colours
My son asked me yesterday why I don't just buy the ready made colours from the market, saves so much time he says. I tried to explain but maybe I did not say it properly.
You see, when I grind the stone and the vegetable dye myself, I am not only making paint. I am doing what my mother did, and her mother before her. The motion of the stone on the stone, it is like a prayer. The smell of the turmeric, the red from the beetle nut leaf, it brings the whole room into the old time. The ready bottles are fine, they are convenient, I do not judge anyone. But my grandmother used to say the colour carries the hands that made it. A fish painted with a colour you ground yourself, it has a life in it.
Also there is a practical thing. The store colours fade fast in our sun. The natural ones, they deepen with age. I have a painting from my mother that is forty years old and the peacock blue is richer now than the day she finished it. You cannot buy that in a bottle.
Maybe I am old fashioned. But I think some things are worth the extra hour.
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This really moved me. What you described with the stone on the stone, that rhythm of it, I know exactly what you mean even though my version is different. I work with pastels and I'll grind my own pigment sometimes, mix it with the binder, and people ask why when there's perfectly good stock from the shop. And I can't always explain it either.
But there is something in the doing of it. The colour you make yourself carries the time you spent making it. That sounds like a sentimental thing to say but I think it's true. A ready made green is just green. The one you ground, it has your morning in it.
Your grandmother's saying, will you share the rest of it? It cut off and I'd really like to know what she said.
That is very well said ji, "the colour you make yourself carries the time you spent making it." I could not have put it like that. My son, he also grinds now sometimes, when he visits. He used to think I was old fashioned. But the other day he said, papa, the red from the kusum flower, it smells like the whole house of my childhood. So the young ones do understand, only in their own time.
Pastels are a different world from my line work, but I think the heart is the same. The hand remembers what the hand makes. Keep grinding your own pigment. That morning you put into the colour, no shop can sell you that. 🙏
"A ready made green is just green. The one you ground, it has your morning in it." That's exactly it, I think you've said it better than I managed.
I'm a pastel painter too, and people don't realise how much of the process for us is in the handling, the grinding, the mixing with a binder. It's slower, sure, but it makes you stay in it longer. There's a patience to it that the ready made stuff skips. And when the piece works, I know part of it is mine in a way that goes beyond the drawing itself.
I've had that same conversation with my partner more than once. He doesn't quite get it either. But I've stopped trying to justify it. Some things you just do because the doing is the point.