Untitled Brown Cleanser

Just what the world needs, a painting titled Brown Cleanser. I was just cleaning the burnt sienna and orange sections of my palette and didn't want to waste the paint which is such a nice colour of rust and earth. Since the early days of painting, both my history and the history of art in general, that rust colour has been a mainstay of artists starting with cave painters tens of thousands of years ago. Historians initially thought that primitive artists gathered this material from the earth and simply smeared it on the rocks, but it was more complicated than that. Archeologists found paint making materials in a cave and did chemical analysis to find that the paint contained mixtures of pigments along with binders and other fillers. Its part of what I enjoy about making paintings, especially on location where I have no technological support for the art other than my bike. Somewhere in my ancestry there was probably some cave person smearing paint on the walls of a cave making doodles of animals or something. In the World Inspired Landscapes: Botswana first version I created a living herd of cave painting animals stampeding across the savanna.

Untitled Brown Cleanser, 9 x 12" sketchbook, 2023