Colour came out of rock before it came out of a tube.
Ships from Italy within 1–3 business days
500gsm · 100% cotton · Hahnemühle Photo Rag · Archival pigment inks · 6 × 18 cm · Matte finish.
Terre sculptée series · 18 of 20 different sets.
Catalogue Nº 088 of 100.
Dispatched from Italy within 1–3 business days.
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The colour in any painting on any wall in any house is, somewhere back in its history, ground rock. Pigment is mineral, and mineral is what the earth has been mixing and pressing for several billion years. The blue in the bedroom of a child born last year was, at some point, lapis lazuli in a quarry in Afghanistan. The yellow on a kitchen ceiling was ochre on a hillside in France. The colour world we live in has a longer history than any of us.
This ridge is one of the rocks pigment used to come from. The white bands are gypsum, the rust streaks iron, the grey patches a mix nobody bothered to name. Folded sideways by tectonic pressure twenty million years ago, worn back into stripes by water and wind, with an autumn forest at the base doing its small annual repaint.
Belongs in the same shelf as Basin and Range by John McPhee, Colour: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay, or any book about pigment at the long end of its history.
There are places on the planet where the land has been carved so finely that it looks like the work of a sculptor who did not know when to stop. Water did most of it. Wind did the rest. The result is a landscape that reads like a written text, with ridges as sentences and ravines as paragraphs, and the only thing missing is the patience to read it. The land has been doing this for millions of years, in plain sight, with no audience required.
