Lauren Thiem, "Pintura de Tierra 5"

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ARTIST STATEMENT

In November of 2023 | travelled to Castrillo de los Polvazares in Northern Spain to attend a workshop at Flores del Camino, a retreat center near the Camino de Santiago. While there I had the opportunity to collect, prepare and paint with local earth pigments. As the process of preparing pigments for painting is long and arduous (dehydrating the dirt, sifting and grinding, sifting and grinding...), we painted with pigments that had been processed by the owners of Flores del Camino, the lovely Basia Goodwin and Bertrand Gamrowski.

This painting was created during my time in Spain. Earth pigments were mixed with acrylic medium and then applied to multi-media paper with a squeegee and palette knife. The variation in the pigments themselves as well as the movement and pressure of the squeegee created wonderful value and saturation differences, loose and tight lines and edges as well as a variety of marks that were largely out of my control.

While I'm quite sure I won't be digging my own pigments going forward, it was rewarding to connect with where earth pigments begin. While they might wind up in a neatly labeled jar finely ground and uniform in particle size or suspended in medium in a tube bought at an art store, they start as dirt. Plain ole regular dirt that just happens to be a pleasing color that humans have been using to make pictures for hundreds of thousands of years.