Sillman explained that her Whitney talk was informed by a reading group on color that had met for years. The group read Aristotle (who wrote that color is an intrinsic property of objects), Isaac Newton (that white light comprises all the colors of the rainbow), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (that all the colors combined make black, and that colors have emotional qualities), and Albert Munsell (who, finding the names of colors chaotic and silly, ordered them with numbers and letters corresponding to hue, value, and saturation). They read Frank O’Hara (“Why I Am Not a Painter”), Robert Hass (“The Problem of Describing Color”), Esther Leslie (“Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry”), and Herman Melville (the “Whiteness of the Whale” chapter from “Moby-Dick”). They read art historians and anthropologists and artists. But the group never agreed on how best to describe what color is. “I realized eventually that there are earth people and there are sky people and that never the twain shall meet,” Sillman said. Earth people thought of color as minerals, mud, pigments—as touchable things. Sky people were focussed on light.
Sillman said that she was more earth than sky, but her main conclusion was that “only Josef Albers was right,” referring to the Bauhaus artist and pedagogue, who said that understanding color should follow from working with it, not theorizing about it. “The person you should really talk to is my former student Roger Carmona, who runs New York Pigment Co.,” she said. “He knows more about color than anyone.”
I visited Carmona’s shop, inconspicuously situated on a scrubby commercial block in Chelsea; it looked like an enchanted apothecary. Wooden shelves held bags and bottles of colored powder. Samples of minerals (azurite, malachite, selenite) rested near the cash register. Painted rectangles of color hung on the walls, displaying the characteristics of pigments in watercolor paints versus oil versus acrylic. For nineteen years, Carmona had worked for the New York branch of Kremer Pigments, which was founded in the seventies by a chemist from Germany named Georg Kremer. Carmona started out fulfilling orders, then eventually taught make-your-own-paint workshops—it had been an incidental apprenticeship. When Kremer closed up the New York store last year, Carmona, in close consultation with him, opened his own shop, which carries Kremer’s pigments. “Georg used to literally knock on people’s doors and ask them if he could dig in their back yards” for new pigments, Carmona said. More recently, Georg’s son David, who shares his father’s dedication, spent two weeks exploring the distinctive rocks of Iceland, where he unearthed three natural-earth pigments, one of which—Snæfellsjökull red, found near the Snæfellsjökull volcano—Carmona now held in his hand.
Carmona began mixing his own paints in college. “Every pigment has a personality,” he explained, placing a small vial of dark powder in my palm. “For example, cobalts tend to be bullies”—they obscure what they are painted over, whereas other pigments have more transparency, which he described as shyness. “Cote d’Azur violet has a silky or velvety personality,” Carmona said. Studio Pigment violet, a lab-produced color made with dioxazine violet and calcium carbonate, “looks synthetic,” he added, indicating a bag that appeared as if it had been filled with crushed candy. “Synthetic pigments refract light differently.” What a pigment is suspended in alters the color further. Egg-tempera paint uses egg yolk, casein uses milk proteins, and oil paint uses linseed oil. “The way the particles are suspended in the oil allows more light to pass through the oil film,” Carmona said, explaining the distinctive shine of oil paints. “That gives depth, which is what the Renaissance painters realized.” Before the Renaissance, egg tempera was dominant. “It has a mother-of-pearl quality.”
