Just between you and me, I don’t think yellow has it all together …

Yellow is the colour-equivalent of gold among pigments, but the traditional colour of lunatic asylums, and also of dandies. So, upon just a cursory glance, yellow could be described as rich, cowardly, crazy, extroverted, and a fop. How can one colour present itself in so many different ways?

Maybe its indecisiveness is the reason why yellow doesn’t historically enter into the artist’s palette until much later. Although there are entire hills made out of ochre in Europe (while here in Canada glaciers scored yellow from the earth during the last ice age …) its cave-art doesn’t make use of yellow amid their red and black silhouettes. Maybe cave-painting is so decisive in it’s nature that there wasn’t room for such a unstable voice on the cave walls …

Yellow will focus though—if you manipulate him. Carefully heat a yellow iron-ochre and he’ll become decidedly red. Offer him just a little black, and he’ll become a beautiful green. Simply throw yellow into an open fire, and he’ll settle down into a solid, “burnt” brown. But, while getting yellow to present himself in one way can be useful as an artist, it isn’t really that I want to change who he is—it’s just that his inconsistent nature gives me a headache: Which tale am I really to believe from yellow?

But this is a atypical problem for me: In my own travels, I’ve found many good siennas, and an assortment of other bright browns, but very rarely a bright yellow ochre on the Canadian landscape …

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Conestogo: Many hands | May 30, 2008 This week I received some unexpected help in the 100 mile ART Project: About 40 grade-seven students from Laurentian Hills Christian School in Kitchener! On Tuesday and Thursday of this week Mrs. Lisa Eelkema and Mrs. Shirley Huinink brought their students on a field trip out to Conestogo to collect some river rocks and then afterwards ...

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Georgetown Pigments | July 9, 2007 For this trip to collect pigment, I was very fortunate to have the help of a fellow member of the Kitchener-Waterloo Gem and Mineral Club, Reiner. After a couple of conversations on the topic of rocks and pigments, Reiner expressed an interest in coming along on my next hunt and so we agreed to a ...

Burning Nova Scotia Pigments | April 28, 2007 For some time I’ve wanted to see what might happen if I heated the pigments I collected from Nova Scotia. As anyone who has ever painted might remember, two of the most common colours found among paints are raw sienna and burnt sienna; the only difference between these two pigments being that one is heated. ...

Nova Scotia Pigments | April 10, 2007 It has been 9 months since my brother, Aaron, and I spent the week collecting pigment/rock samples from old mines in Nova Scotia and the verdict is in as to which of these samples are usable. While I am excited about these colours, not all of them were what I expected (as you will read). ...

Nova Scotia: Finding Colour | October 29, 2006 While the gross work of pounding the pigment into colour was done, there still remained the work of finely grinding them. This work was done during a demonstration at the Homer Watson Gallery. When grinding with a glass muller, one can’t help but notice that some rocks grind up with ease, but others require a bit ...

Musquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia | August 21, 2006 The site of the old Dunbrack Mine caught our interest because the minerals found at the site included two rarities of particular interest: Azurite and Malachite. A local man who we met at the Nova Scotia Gem & Mineral Show, Doug, was kind enough to give us some details of what to look for and ...

Paint Brook, Nova Scotia | August 20, 2006 Today, our search for pigment led us out to Paint Brook, in Elmsvale … The information we had raved about the quality of the gold ochre and burnt sienna pigments found at this source. After speaking with a local man (who told us to, “go fill your boots”!) we headed up the brook. The brook wasn’t ...

West Gore, Nova Scotia | August 19, 2006 We weren’t able to find out much about the old West Gore Mine, but the promise of a black Stibnite vein, “six feet wide” sounded promising when we headed out. Upon arriving it became obvious that the actual mining works were abandoned many, many years ago and there wasn’t a lot to see from that ...

Londonderry, Nova Scotia | August 17, 2006 Londonderry (then called Acadia Mines) was the location of a large iron mine and works until the 1920s. While no longer used to produce iron, the colours reported from this site included a wide range: Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Brown Ochre, and Indian Red. This sounded promising and we thus made it the first stop ...