Art-Winter in Portugal

2 months studio time in a wonderful forest house in Portugal. The main topic of the work is the handmade production of pigments and paint.

In mid-January I reached the beautiful forest house south of Lisbon. I was allowed to stay and work here as long as I wanted. The seclusion and silence was perfect to finally immerse myself deeply and long in my work and to further develop what I otherwise never found the time and peace for.

In specialist literature I studied old recipes and processes in paint production, at every step I looked for colors in my environment - and collected them, from stones to shells to everything else that struck me as particularly colorful. For hours and days I ground stones into powder and filled my glasses... I traveled Portugal in search of colored rocks and this led me to special encounters and incredibly impressive places.

Day after day, I continued experimenting with making crayons and colored pencils, scouring the internet for possible clues to ingredients and recipes, and through a long chain of attempts, finally found my pastel and oil pastel recipes, and a colored pencil recipe. In a large book I painted color patterns with each pigment with different binding agents for painting and found wonderful insights there too. On my way back to Switzerland in early March, I visited the ocher cliffs in the Luberon, where I found further answers in my quest for the production of high-quality color pigments.

You can find a detailed documentation of these developments without disclosure of the secrets discovered at great expense on my website. Because one thing became clear to me: The production of colors is so complex that it actually makes no sense if you have colors available from the industry - because then there is hardly any time for the actual artistic work. But the journey is not over and therefore the discoveries are not yet ready for the world...

Portugalwinter