pied midden: issue no.3 : jarosite and hematite : heidi gustafson

Originally published July 27, 2019

f**king awesome ochre

The ochre pictured above abuts a parking lot that covered and destroyed most of an indigenous Costanoan Ohlone ochre place in what is now called Oakland, California. The remains of a 19th Century sulfur mine is nearby. Ochre expert Heidi Gustafson was led to discover this site by a powerful dream, which was part of her calling to work with ochres as a life path. The ore here is a mixture of red ochre, or hematite, and iron sulphate, or jarosite — a mix of elements valued in different ways by two different cultures.

Heidi teaches that pigment is presence. When ochres enter your life, things begin to shift. Maybe they’re there to guide you through a transition like birth or death, or something more subtle, like a shedding of an old self. Or maybe you’re there to serve them and the species they carry on their earthen backs. If you study with Heidi, don’t expect to suffer sanctimony — like ochre magic, at once mysterious (iron molecules orient to true north when suspended in liquid!) and earthy (what’s more earthy than dirt?) Heidi has a numinous capacity to mainline intuition and a fabulously filthy vocabulary to exclaim over its gifts.

 Pictured here is an ochre stone from the destroyed Costanoan Ohlone ochre lands, gathered by Heidi during one of her early days at the site, back in 2015. How do jarosite and hematite merge when ground in a mortar? My guess is that it’s a little bit like the look of the last rays of the setting sun on a wooded hillside in winter. One way to find out for sure is by subscribing to GROUND BRIGHT, Wild Pigment Project’s pigment-of-the-month subscription offering, because this month’s pigment is, that’s right, ochre from the Costanoan Ohlone ochre place, most generously contributed by Heidi. THANK YOU, Heidi, for sharing your teaching pigment with us! 22% of the gains from this round of subscription proceeds will go to the Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland.

heidi g’s top five reasons to fall In love with ochre

1. Ochre connects humans to each other. 

2. Ochre connects humans to the core of Earth and helps situate us in the cosmos.

3. Ochre connects imagination and matter, time and space.

4. Ochre makes pharmakon.*

5. Ochreous soil hides incredible amounts of microbial diversity, many bacterial and antibacterial geniuses, which dictate and indicate our overall wellbeing.

*Terra sigillata was one of the earliest and most frequently documented portable "pills" found in early pharmacopieas. Largely used for alexipharmic (antidote to poison) purposes. Made from red ochre clay from Lemnos, it was extracted only one day a year, officiated over by a priestess, shaped into small disks and impressed with the seal of Artemis.

earth paint heroes

The first time I ever used a natural pigment was during grad school at the turn of the century (hee hee!), when I realized that concentrated chlorophyll was useable as an ink. I was making giant four-hour blind drawings at the time, and I’d buy liquid chlorophyll in supplement form from natural food stores. I had a terrible habit of licking my paintbrush, and it tasted rich and interesting. Next came red earth from Sedona, Arizona. I scraped the finest particles I could find from the tops of dried puddles and made detailed landscape paintings with them. 

But it wasn’t until I found Anne Wall Thomas’s book, Colors from the Earth: the Preparation and Use of Native Earth Pigments, published in 1980 by Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, that I began to understand how earth pigments could actually replace the synthetic pigments whose hues I loved but which felt somehow devoid of presence. My mom gave me the heavy mortar and pestle that graced the family chopping block (her involvement in the kitchen is purely decorative, and my dad had yet to discover the joys of freshly-ground spices.) I tentatively began to crush earths and pebbles that seemed like they might yield color. Slowly, with the help of Anne’s book, my experiments grew bolder.

I love the concise directions and advice in the book, and the black and white pictures of Anne’s hands performing various pigment-related processing taks: rolling chalk sticks, scraping mulllers clean, measuring honey into gum arabic solution. She covers so much!

I wrote to Anne this month, after locating a gallery which featured a retrospective of her abstract paintings in 2014. She wrote back promptly, and responded patiently to a couple of my questions. I’d read in her book’s introduction that her late husband was the one who initially inspired her to use earth pigments. She writes, with such tenderness, that "...the factual material that I present here can in no way convey the excitement, the genuine reverence and awe, and the never-ending inspiration that Howard Thomas experienced with each earth pigment that he collected and with each use of earth pigments in his painting." She concludes her intro with these important words: "It is in the hope that some of my readers will realize that same heightened awareness that I dedicate my efforts." We do, Anne! Oh, we do!!

I asked Anne what first sparked her husband's passion for earth colors. Turns out, just being around them was enough. She wrote:

Howard Thomas became interested in earth pigments when he first visited the Southeastern US in1941. He wrote in a sketchbook, “The red earth around Asheville NC and south Wasrich - took some back to Milwaukee. First gathered, April, 1941.” His interest in earth pigments continued for the rest of his life and he gathered pigment from many sites. This was a totally independent pursuit, Howard had no mentor in this endeavor. He used earth pigments regularly in his paintings.

 When asked about her own work, she said she uses earth pigments often in her paintings and appreciates the color, and particularly the texture that the pigments provide. She’s had many students over the years, but as far as she knows, only one has incorporated earth pigments into their painting practice.

 Thank you, Anne and Howard, for sharing your passion with so many of us! 

Here's one of Anne's paintings, from the 2014 retrospective at the Lee Hansley Gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina.

GROUND BRIGHT happy news!

 Last month, Wild Pigment Project launched the first-ever pigment-of-the-month subscription offering, which sends subscribers small pouches of lovingly hand-gathered and prepared pigments that have been contributed by exceptional pigment foragers. Lots of you subscribed!! This feels like the beginning of a beautiful thing.

 While there are still a couple of postal glitches to work out (read below if you dare) we've received an overwhelmingly positive response from both subscribers and our featured pigment contributors. We have nearly a full year of contributors lined up who plan to send us their precious pigments!

 Here are the STUNNING pigments subscribers can look forward to:

 August: Heidi Gustafson's ochre!! Yup, that very stone that's pictured above. Sign up before August 11th to receive this one.

September: A very special celadonitefrom Melonie Ancheta, an artist/researcher who identified use of similar pigment by PNWC cultures.

October: Thomas Little's iron pigment made from transmuted gun barrels, no joke. 

November: A lovely lemon-yellow weld lake, from natural dye expert Natalie Stopka.

December: Chalk from the Great Ridge Woods in the United Kingdom, gathered by Caroline Ross, right near Stonehenge. 

January: An indigo lake made with indigo grown from seeds kept secret in Japan during WWII and grown & prepared by Scott Sutton.

February: A lake made by Anong Migwans Beam from fox grapes gathered on her homeland, Manitoulin Island. 

March: A rich Tennessee earth pigment contributed by painter Amanda Brazier.

 It's my guess that you won't want to miss a single one of these...

 GIGANTIC thanks to all contributors for their kind and generous gifts!!! 

And many thanks to all of you who subscribe to this newsletter! Let me know if there's anything more you'd like me to feature here. You can write to me, Tilke Elkins, anytime at info@wildpigmentproject.org  <3

ok, now it's time for GROUND BRIGHT shenanigans (warning: this could be tedious! skip if you don't subscribe or plan to subscribe...)

 Eleven is a special number for me. It’s my birthday (1/11!) and well, it’s just a very pleasing shape, isn’t it? I was thrilled when I found out I could ship pigments in a regular letter envelope at a cost low enough that it made sense to offer the subscription for just $11.00. 

 The first four post office employees I described the mailing to were confident that it would squeak by as an “irregular” letter (postage: U.S. $0.70, yellow butterfly stamp & Global, $1.00 round green flower stamp!). The fifth employee thought mayyyybe the letter was too fat to qualify. So — I took a risk.

 What happened? Well, of the 22 small brown envelopes I mailed out ten days ago as “letters,” only one has been returned. And one even made it all the way to the U.K.! 

 So, I’ve made a slightly unorthodox decision:

 For those of you who don’t mind taking a wee bit of a risk, I’m going to continue to offer the original $11 subscription as GROUND BRIGHT ORIGINAL, and keep using the slightly questionable postage. The only risk you run is that your subscription could arrive a little late, because IF it’s returned to me (chances of this are less than 5%), I will send it to you AS A PACKAGE. This means it will have higher postage & thus a tracking number, so it will definitely get to you if you’re in the U.S. If this happens again the following month, I’ll assume you have a cranky post master in your hometown, and I will again send you your subscription as a package, but I’ll also cancel your subscription soon afterwards and request that (if you’re still interested) you resubscribe to the “GROUND BRIGHT PLUS” option, at $14.00 a month & guaranteed tracking.

 To sweeten this (omg, is it tooooo complicated?!?) deal, GROUND BRIGHT PLUS subscribers will also get TWO EXTRA Wild Pigment Project pigments a year, one at each of the solstices, Winter and Summer.

 TO SUMMARIZE: If you like the low low price of $11/month and you don’t mind risking the slim chance (less than 5%) that your package won’t reach you when you think it will (you’ll get it, just later, at no extra cost to you), just stay put.

 If you want absolute certainty that your pigment will be in the mail soon after it ships, then cancel your current subscription (or request that I cancel it for you) and subscribe to GROUND BRIGHT PLUS. You’ll get 14 on-time pigments a year!

 What ever you do, you won’t lose cash or pigments either way. 

Thanks sooooo much to all of you for subscribing and weathering this adventure with me! It's 'participatory social commerce'! Or something like that. :)

Here's a parting scene from my recent travels down the John Day river in Northern Paiute lands....