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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

beautiful soils of khorasan "where the sun arrives

beautiful soils of khorasan "where the sun arrives from" province, iran.

thx @shahabb1995 🖤

see previous post for big soil art installations made elsewhere in iran

do you know about فرش خاک soil carpets? 😳

do you know about فرش خاک soil carpets? 😳 massive labyrinth installations made of volcanic pigment in a hearthome of hormuz, iran. literally soil gathered within a short distance of this beach where it is site-specifically installed and celebrated.

i esp. love the bluetooth symbol being drawn in at the edge... acknowledging a kind of magical bizarre connection between technology and soil...

thanks to my soil biologist friend @shahabb1995 and artist @hana.shahnavaz for teaching me about this!!

see nxt post for some soil pigment samples from elsewhere in iran...

(these photos are not mine)

occur counsel in snowlight, ie. ochres gathered f

occur counsel in snowlight,

ie. ochres gathered from places in my heart, along wth white chalk frm @foundandground and pale celadonite ala @pigmenthunter

ie. also known as a "ferrous wheel" a sweet term coined by my friend @doriekeschreurs

i am thinking with deep time today, as i digest th

i am thinking with deep time today, as i digest the banalityofevil, cozy nightcap at discount hotel maskless coup underway.

the US capitol building is made of slave-quarried aquia creek sandstone (contains quartz silicia with bits of clay and prone to ochreous weathering) and is from 100 million year old earth on indigenous Patawomeck and Manahoac land of the last several thousand years.

the stone was handtooled and chiseled to build the white capitol and the white house. and several tombstones. because it was easy to carve without breaking....

image of "Block of Aquia Creek sandstone removed from the East Front of US Capitol" ca. 1824, from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

in ancient egypt the sky was made of iron... so m

in ancient egypt the sky was made of iron...

so maybe yu cld call these fallen angels? or my paintbox full of favorite sacred place crayons, paint, drawing sticks, pigment, soil, dreams of iron, all same diff, soul of earth 🖤

spirit visions photo via @davoodvakilzadeh

spirit visions

photo via @davoodvakilzadeh

beloved land offerings that went out last year to

beloved land offerings that went out last year to people for their outer/inner/secret home practices ~~~~~ thank you to all who let more earthic dust into their hearths. these are just a few personal sets i made which i took photos on my phone, there are so many others i wish i cld share that i didnt document fully or that were deeply private or weren't appropriate or allowed to share on la social media.

this first photo is my most recent collab with my dear friend ~ dead coral, scorchrd deer bone, eroding fields, vulture sands, divination lake bed, volcanic clay, dried up swamps, dead plants, burnt earth, doorway dirt and other magic

hello 2021.
long love earth.
multivalence is oxygen.
all matter decays to iron.
🤎

palettes of local places, memories foraged in 2020

palettes of local places, memories foraged in 2020

1. a few minutes up sumas mountain from my studio (sumas is nooksack language, nooksack land)
2. near my sisters house (awaswas ohlone land)
3&4. my grandparents beach (marks in notebook are all made from bits of the eroding cliff behind it) (coast salish)
5. near my loves house (methow)
6&7. drove south into east oregon (n. paiute)
8. on the otherside of the mountains (wenatchi)
9. my teacher place (ohlone)
10. dahlias my rural farmer neighbor grows and gives away for free that live on my dining table over winter (nooksack)

#ochre #ochrearchive #pigments #soil #longliveearth

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