Color Extraction from Earth Pigments

The iconic color you see when you drive across the West (red cliffs, white sands, yellow deserts) are earth pigments. Ochres are the most common of these earth pigments and are iron-based soils and minerals. Earth pigments include ochres as well as other non-iron based soils, stones, and minerals.

Earth pigments have been used for human color expression from time immemorial. We pick up dirt and rub it into our hands and face as children. We use a finger dipped in mud to draw on a rock -- from the caves of France to the deserts of Utah. We add crushed rock color to our cheeks and lips before we leave our homes.

This pigment can be used to draw, to dye, to paint, to print. Marks can be made crudely -- with the simplicity of drawing with a rock -- or get as complicated as the recipes Italian chemists and paint-makers keep closely guarded as secrets.

I seek color on my long walks into the desert, in the deep cuts of road banks on road trips through the West, on a run through the woods with the dog. I find it in the holes I dig for trees to be planted in my front yard, or while sitting on a riverbank throwing a line and fly into the water.

Sourcing earth pigment is about noticing and looking closely at nature. When the snow melts in the spring, what colors, carried by water and sun, stain the drifts? When you pull a root from the earth, what bits and pieces of color still cling to it? What makes up the mud you track in and sweep up off your floor?

I gather earth pigments in my hand, in a jar, in a sack -- whatever vessel I have to carry them. I store them like small mementos of place until I can transform them, as humans have been transforming them for aeons, into art.