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| Healthy and high in fiber: paleo painting! (By little ol' me, of course.) |
Frankly the paleo food movement seems a little arbitrary to
me: vegetables and fruits are ducky; grains and legumes are not, even though
all four exist both in the wild and in big agriculture. (I’d examine this more
closely, but I’m afraid someone might actually attempt to explain it to me.)
My writer pal tells me that paleo cooking is huge right now,
so in the interest of shameless self-promotion I’m founding a paleo painting
movement. This is perhaps easier than paleo fashion (which might include anything
prior to, say, 2006), or paleo cosmetics, which would require kohl (dangerous)
and Spirits of Saturn (deadly).
So what would constitute paleo painting? Anything done on a
cave wall would be fantastic but hard to transport, let alone duplicate on the
inevitable umbrellas sold in museum gift shops. The earth pigments—ochre, sienna
and umber—would be appropriate and useful, and they have the additional
advantage of lightfastness. Ultramarine blue would be fine, too, as long as it
was ground-up lapis lazuli and not a synthetic proximate.
Of course, we would have to dump the odorless mineral
spirits (a petroleum product) and return to turpentine, which is a distillation
of pine resin. And the only white we will have on our palette is lead white,
since it’s been mined for thousands of years.
I decided to rehearse this today with the original paleo
painting material: charcoal. It is harmless, cheap, and easy to find. However,
I objected to peeling the decorative birches in my front yard to make paper, so
used plain old newsprint.
I think I'm going back to modern pigments for field painting. If you're interested in joining me for a fantastic time in mid-Coast Maine this summer, check here for more information.
