Soil and Spirit: Painting Saints in Local Colour.

Using soil to make art is a practice that goes back to mankind’s earliest artistic roots—whether collecting clay for pottery or pigments for cave painting. Such art intuitively witnesses the place from which the soil came and the role of the artist in being an agent of its change, but could it also offer a spiritual experience? I began painting as an apprentice in a traditional Christian monastery where the icons created were rooted in the belief that the earth is beautiful and that there are many ways to understand it—we can work it, study it, and even find the Divine in it. It’s an understanding that continues to inform the way I practice as an artist, and since my hands were blessed for the task, I have continued to create icons for personal and public devotion. However, the monks under which I studied used the bright acrylic paints available in stores for their work ... My own palette and style continues to be shaped by a question that occurred to me after I had left the monastery almost a decade ago: Why can’t I use the colourful earth from my village to make a paint? Well, as it turns out, one can (and Conestoga even has a history that includes the creation of industrial pigment!). Not only can a single colour of paint be created from such soil, but a whole palette can be created from just that place when the local colours are processed and combined with some local cherry stones, a few leaves of woad and some trash. This presentation will discuss such an approach to collecting, processing and painting in creating a studio palette—made from the local colours of the soil of Conestoga, in Ontario, Canada. During this talk, some thoughts about earth pigments and their spiritual roots will be presented, along with the creation of each individual colour being described in detail.