My Pigments
MY PIGMENTS
They were already existed in mighty nature. I only recognized them over the years.
My mother was my first teacher with whom I learned some very basic vegetable and commonly available earth pigments. She used to dye yarn with vegetable pigments and with earth pigments she used to paint on the mud wall and papier-mâché bowls
Local artisan used to decorate Walls of Havelies (palatial houses) with the fresco style using more wide variety of earth and vegetable pigments. I have learnt fresco painting with those artisans as there apprentice in my child hood.
At the age of fourteen I went to learn Thangka painting techniques and the meditative way of Buddhist living. There I learnt wide variety of vegetable, earth, precious and semi precious mineral pigments to grind and washing and also extracting procuring and recognizing the vegetable pigments and as well earth and mineral pigments
Later during my travels to Scandinavia, Europe, Latin America, and Asian countries especially African region I could gather extensive variety of pigments to my Color pallet
The use of natural pigments and binders is an age-old technique to make art works by artists on earth.
The enjoyment of making preparing grinding own color is a great relationships with material its hue and the metamorphosis of it and then in the process of making art a natural intelligence of human and material dose wonder sometime
Vegetables pigments
For the last 30 years of research wok, I have found about 600 sources of vegetables dye and about 1800 hues. Most of them are not permanent in nature and few of them are permanent and tested in art practices and dying process.
They have been extracted from barks, roots, fruits, pollen, fruits and flowers with different techniques and mixture of mordant. I mainly use not more than 10 vegetables dyes for painting because I use vegetable pigments on the upper surface of canvas but while painting on raw cloth or paper I have quit a vast pallet of different hues of vegetable colors.
Mineral pigments
Mineral pigments are mainly divided in to three categories, Earth pigments, semiprecious pigments and precious pigments
My Medium
Egg tempera (water based and oil based), Gum Arabic and vegetables glycerin for watercolor and gouache painting
I prepare my oil-based pigments with beeswax, dammer, linseed oil, and turpentine
I believe that no pigments are unnatural they come from natural sources. Even all-chemical package colors, which are prepared with technologies of modern times. The chemicals are excessively extracted from the sources more and more to fulfill consumer’s need and that I Call a human greed and unnatural way of living against ecological balance