Making Love Visible - Dolci Colori
Verona
I discovered raw pigment powders for the first time in Venice. I found there was nothing else that enabled me to achieve the movement and layering on raw linen. These saturated powders hold the presence of nature and a vital, visceral energy, and painting with them feels very connected to the way story telling evolves in my work. Initially the translucent qualities are dreamlike and come to life by building tone, perception, and depth.
“The pigments have allowed me to explore colours as living entities and to connect with my sensory intuition and ultimately the voice of the work.”
Over a hundred years ago Aturo Dolci, founded a pigment firm outside of Verona. I have been patiently waiting for three years to visit and meet Andrea, the great grandson of Alturo and discover the essence of these powders that have been this family’s heartbeat for four generations.
I rode by bike to Dolci Colori to meet Andrea, about half an hour from the train station in Verona. His beautiful mother was busy in the storefront that sells the firm’s earth colours, oxides, restoration products, building and bio-building products, lime paints, washable paints, plasters, spatolato and ecologic product. Andrea appears and leads me into the factory, his gentle nature expresses immediately the connection he has to the process and meaningful qualities of his material. In his office are cabinets filled with encyclopedic files of powder, many handed down from his grandfather that are utterly comprehensive in the stories and wealth of information they hold.
The walls that lead to the factory are painted with pigment samples, as we venture into the manufacturing area, he shows me the barrels that are filled with the ground minerals that have released their essence in mounds of vibrant colour. Some of the most potent red pigment comes from the earth surrounding Verona. Each earth hue is treated with a different working process, some are coarsely crushed, some first fired in the kiln or others are mulled by hammer or ball mills. It is a process of experimentation over many years that has given Andrea the knowledge to understand each mineral and how best to extract its intrinsic colour.
I am amazed by Andrea’s spirit of generosity, the way he openly shared his knowledge with me, and we certainly found kinship over our common worship of the language of colour. Surrounded by these gifts of the earth I have a new appreciation of why I am so connected to the pigments. Andrea’s stories of the origins of earth colour from the reds, ochres, yellows, purple and green earths: that are regionally specific but principally due to hydroxide silicates (iron, magnesium, and alkali) present in the earth. For example, Green earth of Prun lies in basaltic canals in southern Verona.
“I am mesmerised, as he brings me to his workshop where he reveals how deep his emotion for creating colour is and how it feeds his constant experimentation, and we are naturally ‘in simpatico’ connected through our shared love of the alchemical experience of bringing these earth colours into being. ”
We talked for a long time, and he drove me to the train to return to Venice. To meet the maker of these essential ingredients was to connect with someone that truly understood their power and our appreciation for each other’s expression was beyond words. What became so evident is that this age-old practice of the releasing of colour from the very material of nature and the earth, gives rise to nothing truer in its purity of expression and depth, because it holds with it the very essence of being.