Instructor: Richard Frumess
Wednesday - Thursday
May 27 - 28
10am - 4pm
2 sessions

Understanding the characteristics of the pigments in your paint This is a workshop that is meant to understand color problems and resolve them – problems that drive your color to mud on one extreme or to over-saturated cacophony on the other, problems with flatness from an “overly democratic” lack of hierarchy, or the problem of making sense of the wide range of color choices at our disposal. The resolution comes through an exploration of the characteristics of pigments and their relationship to mediums, grounds, and surface texture. Emphasis is placed on understanding colors by category. For example, opaque pigments vs. translucent pigments affects every aspect of color theory – hue, value, and saturation – and plays a crucial role in color mixing, color interaction, and levels of hierarchy in a composition. The understanding of this and other categories is what helps to resolve color problems by giving a logic to color choices and how that contributes to a painting’s structure. Pigment Sticks, Drawing Oils, and casein paint will be the main paint mediums, but you are welcome to bring any other paint medium or drawing tool.

Richard Frumess has been manufacturing artist paint commercially since 1982 when he began making encaustic paint for Torch Arts Supplies in New York City. In 1988 he founded R&F Handmade Paints and two years later developed Pigment Sticks, R&F’s brand of oil sticks. In the intervening years, he conducted a series of comprehensive tests on the properties of encaustic as well as doing research into its history and contemporary use. Withdrawing from the running of the company in 2014, allowed him the freedom to investigate the underlying principles of the color line that had been developed intuitively over the years by him and R&F’s staff. The workshops that have evolved from this exploration are intended to ground color theory in the materials of color itself.