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pigment buddies huddled together ready for la Pigm

pigment buddies huddled together ready for la Pigments Revealed Symposium, which starts TOMORROW!!!!

wow. kinda unreal!!! im so psyched to finally get to enjoy my friends near and far share their knowledge and what they love and dive into the depths of what we care about .... thank you to all who are participating either as speakers, panelists, volunteers or artists in our exhibition (all 130+ of you!)!!! what amazing and humbling experience this is so far...

also, if you want to join or didnt register yet, yu can still join today or anytime this week. all the speakers and videos and demos will be recorded to watch later too for registered folks, if you miss any or can't attend live.

((did you already register? see yu there!!! u shld've received an email with conference portal info. get in touch with me, or other organizers @wildpigmentproject or @nativepaintrevealed if you didnt)))

this is a sacred Native American ochre spring. líq’tәd (Licton) Springs: designated a legally protected Duwamish/Coast Salish landmark in the City of Seattle in 2019. líq’tәd is Lushootseed (one of many Coast Salish languages) for red ochre. it's the most beautiful, deep, biogenic (living) ochre ive ever met.

a group of local Indigenous youth who are part of the Clear Sky program of the Urban Native Education Alliance, will be SPEAKING at the symposium (yes!!!) on how they spent months documenting and battling to obtain Protected Landmark status for the first Native American heritage site in Seattle (along with @mcremle and others).

I cannot tell you how much this means to us and it will be awesome to meet Cante Remle, Chayton Remle, Akichita Takenalive, Tim Shay, and Asia Gellein and listen and learn from their stories and the process they painstakingly pursued:

from the resolution that they passed to protect this place: "Whereas the City of Seattle was built upon the homelands, villages, gathering and sacred sites of the Duwamish People; and whereas Licton Springs is a x̌áʔx̌aʔ’ali (Sacred Place) a place of spiritual power. This has been a Duwamish religious and holy site since time immemorial..."

UNEA @urbannative_education is also the organization we will be donating 15% of proceeds from our Symposium to help support a Traditional Indigenous Arts Mentorship program. https://www.urbannativeeducation.org/

this is personally meaningful to me, as I grew up only a few miles from this ochre place, in a connected watershed and Melonie @nativepaintrevealed grew up only a mile across Lake Washington from this place as well...It is local for us. Her idea to donate 15% of symposium proceeds rises out of her own Indigenous children having to grow up without the kind of support and programs UNEA provides for urban Native youth, and her commitment to improving education for, and about, Indigenous people.

aides~mémoire of giant's paintbrush place and oth

aides~mémoire of giant's paintbrush place and others in utah

Blombos Cave ochre in abalone shell at the Origins

Blombos Cave ochre in abalone shell at the Origins Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa ~~ a replica created by one of my heroes and archeological ochre extraordinaire Tammy Hodgskiss Reynard @tammyhodgie

she is one of the world's experts on the importance of ochre use and impacts on early modern human cognition... work which takes her to several places and caves of ancient human evolution, including Sibudu, where our ancestors used ochre to make pigment over 75,000 years ago!!!

her symposium talk is gonna be amazing, "The Origins of Art? Ancient Ochre Use and the Origins of the Modern Human Mind"

uh. !!!!!! yes please tell us why we cant escape ochre because it lives in our brain!!! i've seen Tammy talk and its been a huge inspiration and affirmation to my ochre heart and soul. I am pretty sure Tammy will be sharing her experimental research knowledge (which is an amazing marriage of art and science) on how important ochre is in our ancestral origin story, as well as some her close-up methods of deciphering how exactly ochres were worked... (hint: it really has not changed at all in all these thousands of years).

im lovin yu Tammy and excited to learn from you again and again.

PS. ps. ps. ill say more about this later, but Tammy will ALSO be joining me and a few other ochre weirdo experts for a panel more closely exploring the value of engaging interdisplinary and cross species ochre research across deep time. ❤

pics from Tammy

intuited pigments to support a soul dreamscape fro

intuited pigments to support a soul dreamscape from a month or two ago... an addendum to my previous post on pigment as soil.... these are all soils and future soil for mystic images of @rebeccarebouche ~~~~

pigment is soil. soil is life. soil color = materi

pigment is soil. soil is life. soil color = material and ecological insight. crushing rocks into pigment is a type of soil forming.... life forming... if pigment is soil then what does that make painting, exactly? 🤔

amazing soil advocate, dr. karen vaughan @theartofsoil @fortheloveofsoil may be unpacking some of these questions and profound truths, esp. how soil color informs integrated ecological and environmental health wisdom, how sensual texture and aesthetics reveals scientific knowledge, in her talk "The Rainbow Below: Digging Deeper into the Science of Soil Color" at the upcoming pigment symposium!! (link in bio for full talk description). i LOVE love love her work and am inspired by soil science and its wisdom daily.

for a little preview, yu can also go read @smithsonianmagazine article featuring Karen's soil-based color and art work via @theartofsoil 🧬🩸🎨🌾🦠🕸

(pics are from karen or her ig accts)

getting closer to home after 3 contemplative weeks

getting closer to home after 3 contemplative weeks immersed in wild canyon worlds and ancient twists and turns.... thx to generous friends and guides @sacredlandfilmproject @ccdiscovery @darrenjoliver, brett and janet for taking us to sensitive ancient places in remote desert depths. 1st pic is scratches from a few crayon pebbles keeping us company in dry canyon washes.

am now ever more curious to learn from my rad friend @kelseyehanson_ , who is researching the importance of paint technology across the Chaco world (ca. AD 850- 1300 in american southwest) and will be sharing her anthropological knowledge at the 🌈 Symposium!!

i also know Kelsey has done a huge amount of leg work gathering together and protecting archeological pigments and binders, ancient paint cakes (amazing amazing giant paint balls) previously lost and/or mislabeled in SW museum annals, as well as discovering amazing phrasegems hidden in ethnographic documents, like...

"CHROMATIC PRAYER."

pics 2-5 are Kelsey doing her analysis work (Raman), field studies and play! & the last image is a really beautiful diverse series of hands on rock I saw in a cave above a deep spring down in 4 corners area.

in remote canyon desert realms still for a week or

in remote canyon desert realms still for a week or two more... sendin out a lil telegraph peephole in a moments rest near a cell tower...

thanks to professoria @elpitha for her research scouting skills for ochre dream extensions (pics 2+)

((& elsewhere: if you didnt see, there's an interview i did with @tilkefinn for @wildpigmentproject pied midden newsletter 📝 ... also see my stories for some other sweet updates from buddies round here))

Roman archeological mineral pigments.... red ochre

Roman archeological mineral pigments.... red ochre together with cinnabar at the Temple of Venus? volcanic heat changing ochre-painted initiation chambers from from yellow to red? indigo married w hematite? weeds + clay? white of whites from below the Melian fumarole? do yu know how to spot the difference between cinnabar (☠ mercury sulfide) and hematite (❣bless iron)??

Empire colorists in many ways are masters of "mixtures" (ie. cheapening the co$$$$t of fanciful color with local earths)... but my dear colleague @worldpigmentday Ruth Siddall will be revealing much more about these pigments in her upcoming Symposium talk "Painting an Empire." Go read her talk description pigmentsrevealed.com/speakers or link in my bio.

If you don't yet know Ruth's work... google her name! My go-to overview research of hers is "Mineral Pigments in Archaeology (ca. 2018)" Or find a library copy of her collaborative, authorative encyclopedia on historical pigments "The Pigment Compendium," (I refer to it very often for my own research, especially in its exquisite cross-reference of diverse historical terms for the same mineral pigment).

it is going to be a real treat for me to learn from her in virtual person, as she's helped me navigate some questions behind-the-scenes and is a very generous and v knowledgable! thank you Ruth for joining us for this groundbreaking whirlwind of dust downloads!!!

pics 2-10 are from @worldpigmentday
Ruth's public IG account.

verily honored to work with these soft, crumbly ir

verily honored to work with these soft, crumbly iron blue + green earth pigment and learn from their genius and weirdness and diva divineness. i also know that being mentored by living vivianite specialist @nativepaintrevealed and having local northwest friends and gathering stewards @tilkefinn and @pigmenthunter really tuned up my souleyes for catching a glimpse o them in this world 🫂 llllove yu peoples!

in the coming weeks i will be more offline on a camping research trip with my friends @sacredlandfilmproject, and trying to catch glimpses of my buddies, ochre field worker @elpitha and nuclear waste land healer @_morganmwilliams_ .

in moments of reception, im gonna try to start (along w @wildpigmentproject) to share all the details on the experts and talks for the symposium. you can also just go read them all now online too (link in bio). they blow my mind already!!!

lastly, for those who read this far 🧿, thanks to all the amazing Pigment Symposium registrations flowing in (!!!), we've reached our attendance goal and can now make a limited number of extra extra deep sliding scale admission ($100!!) available to those who want to attend but really need further assistance, without applying for a scholarship. is that u??? get on this!! Being able to make this knowledge (in short: a natural mineral pigment MASTER of masters class series) accessible to anyone, is our goal.

And to all our supporters and community who've made this possible thus far: THANK YOU!! You are amazing. Can't wait to see and share with you there!!! Please continue to spread the word in the dusty ether....

ochre memories of my childhood spent in coastal wa

ochre memories of my childhood spent in coastal washington...thx to deerest @wildpigmentproject for inviting me to make a renewal offering to her Ground Bright pigment angel service.... go read her latest post to see more!!

iz a special pigment for me because both my papa's side grandancestors ashes are at the nearby green burial cemetary, so i always bring them this ochre when i go here 🤍

several of you also went to this place with me when I was giving workshops in person last couple years..... so yu'll recognize this magic !!! i am really looking forward to being in my beloved lands and welcoming people into my rural ochre den again in the coming months!!!

2-4th pics are Tilkes photos from joining me in a workshop.

"the world as inherently intelligible in its aesth

"the world as inherently intelligible in its aesthetic presentation, requiring no revelation for its divinity..." ~ james hillman

i made a new altar of natural mineral and earth pi

i made a new altar of natural mineral and earth pigments sent to me by several people who will be sharing their knowledge at the Pigments Revealed Symposium in June. (and a few xtras i selected as mineral representatives in lieu of a personally sent one).

it is an off-the-scale beautiful group of people and creative earth powers! i am overjoyed to see so many of you already signed up to join our conversations. am stoked to see what we will learn together!!!

ps. this little arrangement doubles as my annual birthday present to myself, an offering to a counsel of rock teachers i learned from or want to learn from this year 🪨🗿🌈🎨☄🧭🌋🤯💗🌍 . i took my bday weekend to also spend time "off" from rocks and simply enjoy a peaceful picnic day by the Salish Sea (2nd photo taken by my love, of birds migrating back up north thru the Georgia Strait).

pps. i couldn't tag everyone in the photo so go plz see the whole list of folks at pigmentsrevealed.com/speakers

I am so so excited to officiiialllyyy invite you t

I am so so excited to officiiialllyyy invite you to join me and several colleagues for a natural pigment knowledge extravaganza!!! Registration is NOW OPEN for the 1st International Pigments Revealed Symposium (online)!!

Link in my bio ~~~ get your spot ASAP && read juicy details, sliding scale cost + scholarships, submit art or posters, and help spread the word!!!

This event is for anyone curious about, or working with, mineral and earth pigments and their vibrant, interdisciplinary and challenging teachings for our times and planet!

I am already drooooling to hear 20+ talks, panels and demos by super inspiring experts across so many fields of knowledge: artists, geochemists, anthropologists, artists, alchemists, paintmakers, educators and more, i need a seperate post for this.

I will do a rare talk on my ochre practice, as well as moderate a conversation with early sapiens hardcore research folks on "Ochre Across Deep Time."

Many blessings to my dear friend and organizer @nativepaintrevealed Melonie Ancheta (Blackfeet, Cherokee, Nez Perce, Irish) who has been dreaming and praying for a pigment technology event in her sleep for 20+ years. @wildpigmentproject and I are volunteers supporting her vision and helping co-organize behind the scenes. feel free to send questions our way!

AND by coming to the symposium, you will also be helping us donate 15% of our proceeds to a local Duwamish and Indigenous-run organization, Urban Native Education Alliance @urbannativeera, traditional arts mentorship program.

more to details come in next posts...

again, focus is on ***mineral and earth pigments**** but botanical and synthetic pigment folks are encouraged and welcome!

see "grey" cliff?? it holds all those ochre colors

see "grey" cliff?? it holds all those ochre colors on right. images featured in Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss (see 2nd + 3rd pic for closeups).

thanks to my friends at @codexfoundation for wrangling this global exhibition (and catalogue) of shows, art and writing focused on the issues of extraction, especially of minerals. grateful to be included amongst many thoughtful works and exhibitions.

explore more related work at @extraction_art

sometimes i leave a trace. a little land SOS? from

sometimes i leave a trace. a little land SOS? from this spot i see several huge white rectangular industrial buildings without windows built right along a majestic river. nobody is outside.

a fruit tree alone in the parking lot has every single inch of branch body covered in blossoms, as if searching with all its last yearning desire for a lover or a friend?

also how the hell are the bones of cows so heavy and so huge??

ochre work ez v intense sometimes ~~~ so many many

ochre work ez v intense sometimes ~~~ so many many beings, so far aflung places in deep time, tending to idiotic extraction, memory loss, so much sussing apocryphal sounds....

to quiet my heartmind, i took a day last week to just play wander with foraged ochres i love (mixed with water), with my love, along wormy bark paths and listen to a sweet audio book version of Sand Talk (which is great!)...

three ochres i hung with were gathered by friends, @cosasrosaura and @el_matojal best purple soil ochre anywhere (puerto rico), @elpitha s iron wine, nancy pobanz's comb wash vibrancy via @wildpigmentproject groundbright, and others collected in the company of @juliegibvam @pigmenthunter @nativepaintrevealed my love, my catdog dove, other non-humans and ancestors...

if you wanna see full/tall picture of the bark, i put in my stories

red ochre in the 2nd photo upper left is from a few feet away from where i found this wood in my local sumas mt (nooksack)

last pic is ochre pinches that were left over that i offered back into the fire 🌬☄

long live Earth &&& grateful to see pigments in mo

long live Earth &&& grateful to see pigments in motion around this big marvelous being-rock-home on #worldpigmentday @worldpigmentday

digging in the flatland muds (soil folks~~ whats yr best guess on this blueish-grey clay process?), watching snow geese warming up for their migration home to wrangler island in the far arctic north, and closing my eyes at obscenity of daffodialtones ~~~

sending love from the northwest!

toxic waste (that make non-toxic ochre pigments),

toxic waste (that make non-toxic ochre pigments), a little time travel back to some research from 3 years ago 🧭

"empathy" is a perfect word to describe ochre root

"empathy" is a perfect word to describe ochre root practice. thank you to 生活月刊 Life Magazine (China) for the feature and interview!!!

when i used google translate for the main title it says "SPLENDID GEOCENTRIC" but in the back of the magazine they have a summary section in english that calls the piece "HEARTS OF THE EARTH" 😍

i love these both so much. i do think about each ochre as a piece of the heart of Earth. as I say in the interview, talking about an auditory parallel between the Tibetan term "ökur" and "ochre", "When I hold ochre rocks, I too often think of myself as holding a greatly realized being in meditation beyond death."

#生活月刊 & thank you Zhou Yiming for the conversation!

workin/thinking .... pigment stones gathered w my

workin/thinking .... pigment stones gathered w my bare ol hands from island, prairie, mnt, and coast

on a walk in my backyard rainbow mountain creek 🙌🏽

roadside pharmacopeia

roadside pharmacopeia

in love with Tataviam earth pigments shared from m

in love with Tataviam earth pigments shared from my friends Alan Salazar @alan.salazar.1942 (Tataviam and Chumash elder storyteller) and Mona Lewis @sunspritehandwork. they were gathered in an ancient Tataviam tribal village area (now by the side of a highway in Santa Clarita Valley, northern LA county, CA) to paint this nature story by Alan and illustrated by Mona (a former student of mine!).

i bought Tata the Tataviam Towhee to read with my niece who loves birds and rocks (😁) and lives in California. and little secret: in the back of the book are exercises on how to make paint and charcoal drawing sticks!!!

1. pigments gathered on Tataviam land by Alan and Mona (and shared w their permission).
2. cover of book (you can buy it online!! ill post link in story or visit @sunspritehandwork bio)
3. map of Tataviam land... made WITH the actual land
4.ochre rocks with the painting they made 💛
5. same ochre rocks from the Tataviam land
6. Tataviam land
7. clues
8. Mona & Alan's all local Chumash and Tataviam palette they are building for their next collaboration...

sharing metal dusts, making soil, doing work... on

sharing metal dusts, making soil, doing work... one dialogue and a few studio notes at a time:

deeper red ochre shown here is local washington iron ox formed after an environmental toxic mine government superfund remediation in the spot that perhaps someday will be bless'd for the ochre sanctuary/columbarium ill build to continue honoring the recovery of that land?

purple purple ochre is by way of dear @wildpigmentproject who just shared a good reverie on ochre terminology and some really amazing forthcoming ochres in her pigment series. powerful. dark red purple is by way of @elpitha who is working with broken iron ox land in utah and we had a sweet ochre universe alignment yesterday. joyful way to start the year of the metal ox!!

other pigment love being spread in earth worship include gatherings i did on la oregon coast with @pigmenthunter and his wisdoms, finally ripened 2017ish? soft love from columbia landwork via @catalina.christensen, a beloved grey soil from 10? 15? meters underground in brazil from soil engineer @zeifurtado, island gatherings with genius @juliegibvam (and george's ancestral homecooked fuel extradordaire) and master of masters forager @buckmcadoo, oldtime france earths gathered by @doriekeschreurs and gifts of abundance from activist @cosasrosaura farm land in puerto rico. i love my family all beings on earth, esp earth listeners and tenders and thank you for being here in this prayer for the everlasting spincycle which is life on earth

mysteries of pyrple. & a note for foragers: purple

mysteries of pyrple. & a note for foragers: purple rocks and soil are usually not ~purple~ as pigment. swipe to 2nd pic to seee marks these earths make when they are rubbed directly on paper.

most often they show their true warmer red bias hematite underlinings. i have no idea how that works, and honestly i care very little, why. if you find purple that stays present, my best guess is you've got another metal infrastructure besides iron ~~ magnesium...? aluminum...? bossing the life-eye-brain-color job.

thus... if you want pure purples, stick to torturing snails or gathering mussel shells or making flora lakes!

ps. that dark island shipwreck iron is one of my favorite n. american ochre minerals of all time ala @a.rural.pen

anybody want a glimpse into my ochre realm? this i

anybody want a glimpse into my ochre realm? this is also where i live and dream and eat.... 🙌🏽

northwest ochre 🫀 before, during and after flig

northwest ochre 🫀 before, during and after flight to a new home. to finally feel capable to make these land windows for other people and spaces outside of my ochre sanctuary, brings me tons of joy. perhaps akin to a kind of "unburial" ?? (a term foraged via fellow deep diver @robgmacfarlane).

made wth the help of local pacific northwest landforms, rocks, soil souls, trees, mastikha tears, cedar smoke, well water and an old spirit stick i carved while walking hebridian machair and peat lands underneath golden eagles.

i cld share this piece thanks to rad @beau_buck with whom it now lives

(ps. yes the cloth its safeguarded in i dyed by rubbing with red ochre soils too)

soil stories from lynching sites in the US. from t

soil stories from lynching sites in the US. from the important and unforgettable rememberance project of @eji_org and Bryan Stevenson, installed at the national memorial for peace and justice in alabama.

photo 2 & words from @eji_org:

"In 1893, a white mob stormed the jail in Carrollton, Alabama, and lynched Paul Hill, Paul Archer, Will Archer, Emma Fair, and Ed Guyton, four black men and a black woman who had been accused of setting a fire that destroyed a mill and gin house. They did not resist arrest and insisted that they were innocent. As the great anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells wrote in her investigation of the lynching, the unarmed black people "in their bolted prison cells could do nothing but suffer and die.""

photo 3 & words from eji:

"People from near and far gathered in Abbeville, South Carolina, to commemorate and reflect upon the 100th anniversary of a tragic event: the lynching of Anthony P. Crawford. During a ceremony on Friday, family members collected soil from the site where Mr. Crawford was lynched, and a consecration service in the Abbeville town square was held."

i posted about this project in 2019, but this week it seems really important to remember....

visit their website to learn more eji.org

clay from all the US states, admiring this sweet w

clay from all the US states, admiring this sweet work by @adamsilvermanstudio & photo by @erik.benjamins

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