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Mr. Neubig |
I have eight different colors of clay and dirt that I dig, all of these
are dug from Louisiana. I'll let you look at these, you can pass them
around, examine them more closely. These are found anywhere from northern
border, near Arkansas, down to the marshes and swamps down below Houma
and also in St. Francisville. I have about four different colors that
I find from that particular area. You can see this particular piece is
from St. Francisville and has that mauve color that you see is dominant
in some of my pictures.
I paint on paper, which is rag paper, watercolor paper. To all of you
who are painters or artists, or just watercolor paper, usually 140 pound.
My paint is very similar to watercolor except for the fact that my binder
is egg yolk. I prepared this before I came. This is one egg yolk that
is diluted by about half, with water. I mix this as I paint.
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Painting by H. Neubig |
All of these colors are iron oxides, in different degrees of oxidation.
The yellow...If you dug down here...where ever you find clay, you'll find
little veins of yellow, little strata of yellow. Its just a matter of
digging it out or finding an area where there is an abundance of it. I
do have pet names for some of my dirt, that I'll explain as I go through.
This dark color, you saw chunk in the cup that I passed around, is swamp
mud. In South Louisiana we call it "gumbo mud," "black-jack," or any other
name. It probably has a lot of rotted vegetation that, over the many,
many centuries, have made it this dark color. Plus the fact that the oil
industry, before the age of ecology-minded people, they probably dumped
a lot of crude oil down in the swamps and marshes. I think it homogenized
with this and made a very beautiful, dark color. This particular dark
came off of a crab trap down below Houma. My brother-in-law, at that time,
had a fishing camp in a little area called Dulac. Those of you who are
from Louisiana know that Dulac is a three-house village, down in south
Louisiana. So I've named this particular color "Dulac Black." My other
pet color, which is a very transparent brown comes from Avoyelles Parish,
around Bunkie and that area. This is my "Bunkie Brown." It makes a very
nice transparent color.
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