River Street Gallery- Article by Peggy Townsend, "Color Hunter"

R I V E R S T R E E T G A L L E R Y

Color Hunter: the natural world shades his palette
by PEGGY TOWNSEND, Staff Writer,
Santa Cruz Sentinel
published 7-30-2000 (revised)

Robert Watson slips down the side of the San Lorenzo River levee and disappears into the brush.
He pushes through tall green branches that slap against his arms and face. Steps through old campsites with their blackened fire pits.

On the street above, shoppers lug plastic bags of groceries to their cars; but as far as Watson is concerned, this just as well could be 350,000 years ago when man went out and killed his food.

Watson is a pigment hunter, an artist who fills his paintbox the same way prehistoric man did.

He finds rocks and minerals.

Next to the river, Watson stops and picks up an ordinary looking chunk of rock.

"See how easy the powder comes off this rock," Watson says, rubbing the stone, which leaves a yellowish powder on his hand.

That’s probably how ancient man discovered pigments, especially the red earths, he says.

Seeing a color that reminded him of blood, prehistoric man may have rubbed a streak on his face. Then he may have taken the rock home and ground it up, mixing it with animal fat and using it to draw the story of a hunt on the wall of his cave.

Artists like Michelangelo and Rembrandt may have done the same thing, looking for rocks that would yield shadowy flesh tones and deep umbers.

But not many artists hunt for pigment any more.

Instead of scouring beaches and hillsides for rocks and minerals, they go to stores for tubes of bright purples, reds and yellows.

Watson, however, is fascinated by the colors that the earth gives and the honesty it brings to art.

He has made pigments his life’s study for the past 25 years.

"Pigment hunting is more like collecting jewels," says Watson, walking past two men who hunch in the shade wondering why he is scrambling out of the undergrowth.

"It’s a spiritual connection to the earth."

The first pigment hunters probably lived 350,000 to 400,000 years ago.

In a cave at Twin Rivers in Zambia, Africa, British archeologist have discovered grinding tools and chips of dark-red pigment that, when analyzed, showed they had come from more than two miles away.

They theorized the pigment was used to adorn the bodies of the prehistoric people for rituals or initiation ceremonies.

But probably the best known pigment hunters were those who lived in a cave outside of Lascaux, France, more than 16,000 years ago.

According to scientists, these pigment hunters traveled as far as 25 miles away to get the deep red pigments they so prized.

Because the rocks were rich in clay, it was easy for these people to grind them into a fine powder. Mixed with vegetable juice, blood, urine or animal fat, these paints became the graceful horses and fighting bulls that adorn the walls of the cave and drew hundreds of thousands of tourists
until 1963.

Historians believe these pictures were drawn with twigs, clumps of moss and feathers. There is even evidence these early artists filled a hollow bone with paint and blew it into the walls, creating a kind of prehistoric air brush.

For mellinia, rocks and minerals were the only permanent colors artists had available.

Medieval Italian painters used a rock called terra verte for shadowy flesh tones. Michaelangelo used natural red chalk to create some of his paintings.

But by the 18th century, synthetic colors were being made and pigment hunting died out.

Except for a devoted few.

Except for Watson.

Highway 1 is quiet as Watson hurries across the road and ducks under a low-hanging cypress tree.

Like most hunters, he gravitates to places that are untouched and hard to reach.

This is a beach near Davenport and the only people on it are two lovers who cuddle under a blanket.

Seeing Watson stooping over rocks and digging around old campfires, the couple decides he’s harmless and soon disappear back under their blanket.

"Carbonaceous mudstone," Watson says, breaking open a piece of rock to show a dark interior where the stone was scorched in some long forgotten bonfire.

Ground up and mixed with oil, the rock becomes a beautiful blackish brown paint that Watson compares to a Van Dyke brown.

He calls it Davenport Brown.

"This is one of the natural colors of Santa Cruz," Watson says.

There are many places known for their pigments, he explains.

France has its rich ochres and Italy had the rare Verona Green, but Santa Cruz has its own wonderful shades: olive green glauconites, rusty schists and golden ochres.

One of the world’s best known pigment masters even asked Watson for some of a golden stained feldspar he found in a man’s eroded driveway in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Watson declined, mostly because he didn’t want to have to knock on someone’s door and ask if he could dig up two feet of their driveway.

For Watson, the beauty of these natural pigments is that they mirror the colors of the world around him.

A green stone matches the subtle colors of a far-off coastal hill. A golden ochre looks like a hill of summer grass.

In fact, Watson is experimenting with using the colors of Santa Cruz to paint Santa Cruz.

Back in his studio he’s got a painting of a tree-studded mountain popping out of summer fog like an island in the middle of the sea.

He used tourmaline he found in a vein of granite in Santa Cruz Mountains to paint the landscape. Using nature to paint nature, the gray matches the color of the morning fog perfectly.

"Watch this," he says, turning the painting toward the window.

The tourmaline glitters in the sun.

Watson hunts for pigment the way a man hunts for his love: passionately and protectively.

Drive along a mountain road with him and he may suddenly stop to investigate a streak of green rock or a patch of red stone.

Once he talked his way into a bag full of green sand from a quarry. Another time, he dug up a vein of tourmaline he had seen in a creek.

"The thing is, you lust for color," Watson says.

But he won’t give away all of his secrets.

Ask to go pigment hunting with him and he’ll only take you to beaches where black iron oxide washes down from the mountains in abundance, or a place where there are plenty of rocks.

"Only small amounts of minerals are needed for artists’ purposes," he says, hoping people don’t rush out and start digging up driveways or chipping stones off a state beach.

When he takes you to a spot where there is a shelf of dusky green glauconite in siltstone that is similar to the now-exhausted terra verte deposits near Verona, Italy, he makes you promise not to tell where it is.

It’s the way a pigment hunter has to be.

Watson is a precise man, pronouncing German or French mineral names with the correct accent and who prepares samples of colors to analyze the shades.

Ask him about a rock and he’ll tell you how it was formed, where it came from and the health problems you can get if you grind it without breathing apparatus.

Show him a rock and he’ll explains the different way it looks when you mix it in oil or in water.

He knows these things, mostly because he’s either read about them or tried them.

He’s spent hours at the university reading books on minerals, studying old mining maps and listening to old timers’ stories in hopes of finding a new place to look for color.

He’s taken weeks to grind up rocks and experiment with how they look in oil or acrylic.

When a color works, he’ll name it: San Lorenzo Yellow Ochre or Santa Cruz Golden Ochre.

Watson could probably make a good living selling pigments, but he doesn’t.

Back in his office, Watson picks up a couple of purple mollusk shells and begins to grind them into a fine powder. Like many of the substances he works with, the shell dust is toxic if inhaled, so he’s careful to grind them in water.

The shells crumble and creak against the bowl. Watson grimaces as he grinds.

Mixed with gum arabic, it turns into a rich lavender he calls Marine Purple, and says it resembles the Royal Purple of Roman times.

A big geologic map of Santa Cruz hangs on the wall of his shop.

"I’m still looking for cinnabar in this county," he says.

Out on the beach with the afternoon wind whipping the ocean, Watson shows how you could use a magnet to pick up bits of iron oxide that wash down from the mountain in winter rains to make a permanent rich black color.

He scans walls of Santa Cruz mudstone and even wonders if seagull droppings could be used to make white paint.

Out by the water, he knees in the sand looking for perfect bits of shell for his Marine Purple color.

He looks up at the blue sky, the green ocean, the gold-green cliffs — the colors in the rocks around him.

"This just inspires a feeling of wanting to paint" he says.

"For me, this is art."