We’ve had fabulous new snow here for a couple weeks, which is immensely inspirational. Actually cameras, as well as paints, can have weather problems, particularly batteries that don’t work in the cold. But the main obstacle is the “in your time” part–it’s been completely lacking. Yet I am confident I’ll get out sooner or later…

So far, I have only read what dickblick.com says about the pigments under pigment information. For example, http://www.dickblick.com/items/00461-5423/#PG7

Do you have an easily accessible reference for various pigments, etc? I could use one.

Thanks for telling me about the barrier cream.

Organizing chemicals with respect to their potential hazards is a habit of mine that is formed by obligatory yearly refresher courses in chemical safety together with routine inspections of laboratory environments to enforce chemical safety procedures.

Barrier Cream is a special cream made to block toxicity from paints. I use it whenever I’m painting — basically whenever I enter my studio, the first thing I do is smooth on some barrier cream, whether I’m gessoing with acrylic or painting with davy’s grey.

Here’s one example (Barrier Cream the brand name that I use, but there are others, I believe):
http://www.dickblick.com/zz004/91/

It’s a Winsor-Newton product that you can buy in jars (for the studio) or tubes (for plein air) I have both. And as I said I also use gloves, although they irritate me (emotionally and sometimes physically) so I limit their uses to messy matters — gessoing, for example, and if the wind is really wild outside. I even have long (mid-arm length) cleaning gloves for the times when I’m reaching down into my odorless mineral spirit containers to get the sludge out.

I try to be cautious but not paranoid about toxic materials. I’m always glad to have a bit of new info, such as you gave me about lamp black. But I’ll admit that I’m not as organized as you are about such things.

Is a barrier cream a special kind of skin cream or will any skin cream do?

I, too, contemplated using surgical gloves. So far, I have separated my paints into 3 categories – carcinogens, skin irritants and nontoxic.

I’m responding to your idea of a “linear scaffolding.” My background in textiles and quilted art makes me understand the delight of the linear — not just the line, but the gridded line and spacings. So doing a gridded drawing and then painting over it feels like it has all kinds of potential.

I’m thinking that it would make people more comfortable (or responsive, perhaps) to my wonkier efforts — if I took out a support gridded with permanent ink and then did one of my cityscapes over it, people might have to linger more than 3 seconds. At least it would make clear that the wonkiness wasn’t just naive but rather intentional. It would hurt the eyes to look at, though. I might just have to try it.

Permanent ink (like Micron Archivals), comes through loud and clear even under opaque oil paint — you can’t overpaint it to oblivion — the only remedy is to hide it with more permanent ink. And I know this because I have at least once signed an abstract and then decided I liked it better turned upside down — only to discover that my signature was still clearly readable. All the lamp black in the world didn’t seem to obscure it.

And now I’m wondering what would happen if I painted over the viridian studies that I did — the formal versions, with the little squares of variations of greens and yellows and browns. Another gimmick, methinks, but fun to think of.

As it is January 2, I’m about to cut into pieces one long quilted landscape from John Day. It has been an irritant for months and today’s the day to get my revenge. Besides, the holidays are over and I can reclaim my textile (living room) studio.