lightfastness – Wacław Wantuch

My neighbour crashed my system

My neighbour crashed my system. She is a professional.The oldest paintings by early artists are tens of thousands of years old. All of them – those from caves in Indonesia or South Africa, and those from Spain or France – have in common the use of natural earth pigment, or varieties of rust. Specifically: ochre […]

Only in exceptional situations do I buy ready-made paint, because I usually paint pictures with paints that I make myself in my studio. I recreate the technologies of the old masters of oil painting. Paints in masterpieces by Rembrandt, da Vinci and Vermeer often contain the same type of earth pigments. In the past, these raw materials were imported along the Silk Road, but today I order them online or look for them in mineral fairs. If I need pigments that were already used in cave painting, then together with geologists we look for them in caves.

I thicken the linseed oil in the sun according to the 14th-century recipe of Cennino Cennini, the author of the “A Treatise on Painting”. Such oil mixed with pigment is an excellent binder used in the glazing technique. Glazing, that is a method of applying multiple layers of semi-transparent paint, was used by the great masters of oil painting for centuries.