Ask Stape, Mad cow disease and ivory black

Dear Stape

As I told you before, I am a one armed widow living down here in the container docks.I have to eat, so I have been running a trap line for meter readers in my neighborhood. I caught one the other day, well at least I did for a while. It was a bizarre young women all dressed in black, wearing black lipstick. She was flopping about hideously, barking like a dog, and screaming threats in ancient Aramaic. I have heard that a coyote will chew off its leg to escape a leg hold trap, but this woman actually chewed through the steel trap itself! She appeared to be wearing some sort of black dentures!

By the time I could get back with the net and the ether, she was gone. She also ran off with the black plastic eyeglasses and cheap narrow brimmed fedora I was using as bait.
When I retrieved my damaged trap there was black paint everywhere. It was all over the meter and the stairs. Frankly the whole thing makes me nervous. Now I am starting to worry, could I get mad cow disease from all of that ivory black paint? I know it is made from animal bones. Is Ivory black dangerous?

signed Oneulna


Oneulna:

I did some research on the question of "Mad Cow Disease and ivory black, actually, I did a lot of research. I contacted the CDC in Atlanta ( no kidding) and an expert on BSE ( as they like to call it) answered the question. Their opinion is that the risk is "vanishingly small".

The odds of getting it from carbonized bone that is handled and not ingested would be extremely small. While it is theoretically possible for the prions that cause this disease (called Creutzfeldt Jakob in humans) to survive the extreme heat used in making the pigment, it is not likely, given the temperatures to which the bone material is heated and the length of time that heat is maintained. Oddly enough the CDC already had researched this question for the potters, who use bone ash in the making of china and certain sorts of pottery. People would of course be eating from those products. There are no food grade bone black pigments, but there are bone black pigments approved for the cosmetic industry.. Incidences of the disease in humans even where there have been cattle with BSE are extremely rare.
The disease is carried in the nerve tissue and not in the bone. A major paint manufacturer when contacted about this explained that as a precaution the bone used to make ivory black doesn't include skulls or vertebra.

So Oneulna, I would go ahead and use ivory black without reservation, but I don't think you should eat it. Even if you did, I think the odds of your getting "mad cow" are very,very small.

I also think you need to be far more careful about where you set your traps though. Not everyone is nice.
.......................Stape

Danger, alligators, and other subhuman visitors

I think tonight I will write about landscape painting and animal visitors., Personally I hate animals, but they do show up and I want to talk about dealing with them. I believe I will do this as a bulleted list. Everybody seems to like those and they make an orderly presentation.

• Alligators, evidently they rarely eat people and when they do the people are in the water with them. They prefer Pomeranians and other small yippy dogs. I saw a 120 foot alligator today. I like them best as luggage. You can put a Pomeranian in a suitcase and still get it back later.
• Dogs, In my experience a dog won't bite a painting man, but a goose will. I had a dog eat a tube of thalo green once, it survived.
• Cows, are harmless but they are curious and will gather around your easel and make it impossible to work. They also may lick your palette, I have seen that. Try explaining that to a farmer, I wonder if thalo shows up in their milk?
• Bulls, A subcategory of cows, nasty and dangerous. Don't cross people's fences without permission. Find out if the bull is in the field with the cows before you enter. Always close gates behind you. Always.
  
• Snakes, I have a pair of snake boots from Cabelas. I bought them for trips to West Texas. The last time I was in Texas they were running a special on pit vipers. Having those boots made it possible not to obsess over the snakes. They have changed the recommendations on snakebite treatment, and I suggest that if you are in snaky country you research the recommendations for your area. In short, get to the hospital for anti-venom.
• Javelinas, I hate these too. Feral marauders that travel in packs, I have contended with them in West Texas. They will rifle through your belongings looking for food. They will, I believe attack a person if they get the nerve. Disgusting vermin. Possibly related to Hippopotomi , they can eat a prickly pear, spines and all. They could make short work of a foot no doubt

• 

• Scorpions, more Texas fare. Shake out your boots and keep your hands out of nooks and crannies in rocks etc. Their bite won't kill you but is unpleasant. There are evidently scorpions whose bite is lethal, but not in the states.
• Bees, unless you are allergic to them they are just a nuisance. If you are allergic to them, you should carry the medical remedy and probably already do.I had one sting me last year for no good reason. Eat more honey, deprive their young of food.
• Blackflies, if you paint in Maine in the early summer you know about these, they bite a big hole in you. It may leave a scar that will take a year or more to disappear. They are fond of elbows and forearms. I wear insect repugnant containing Deet. They don't find it repellent but repugnant. They will still bite you, thats their nature, however they enjoy it somewhat less. Best removed from paintings after the painting has dried. Then they will brush out.
  
• Mosquitos, be glad they aren't blackflies. I think Deepwoods Off in a spray can works well.
• Ticks, It is recommended that you tuck your pants into your socks. I just can't bring myself to do it though.I try to stay out of the brush and high grass. I do spray Deepwoods Off on my ankles whenever a go out in the summer, in a place that they are likely to be. Lyme disease is serious, I don't know why I, of all people haven't contracted it. I even paint in Lyme occasionally.
• Bears, I almost ran over a grizzly in Yellowstone, it was the size of an SUV and ran out right in front of me. I hit the brakes and missed it by inches. When painting in bear country you carry bear spray, which is a pepper spray in a can the size of a small fire extinguisher. I am sure it must work, I think. Black bears here in New England are rarely a problem, I don't worry much about them. They will generally avoid you.
  
• Fire ants, they have them all over the south, don't set up on their mounds.
  
• Piranha, never seen one. Let me know. Same for lemurs and anteaters.

My friend Scott Moore and I are opening a show March 5th at the Ella Walton Richardson Gallery on Broad street in Charleston South Carolina. If you are in the area please come. I would love to meet you.

I will be announcing a workshop in June at the inn up in the White mountains again, I will have the details for you in a couple of days. Lay down with your arms at your sides and I will get back to you.

Balance and intention

Some times when I teach workshops I have noticed that I tell a student to do one thing and I tell the next student to do just the opposite! I often hear a student complain that a noted artist whose work I admire, has recommended exactly the opposite of what I am suggesting. Whats going on? I wonders dumbly.

The answer concerns balance. Artists are constantly balancing opposing ideas. Here are some opposites between which we must select.

• Tonality, is this painting, or passage, a light one? Or dark ?
  
• Color, is this painting going to be in earth colors or chromatic?
• Transparent or opaque?
• Tightly rendered or loose?
• High contrast, or low?
• Soft edges or hard?
• Decorative or naturalistic?
  
• Highly colored or grave?
• Will it have an impasto surface or be enamel smooth?
• Will it have brushwork or no?

You see what I mean. These are not matters of right and wrong but of taste and preference. Answering these questions for ourselves is the first step in artmaking. If you are not making decisions you are not making art. Many times an artist will choose to place his painting somewhere between the two extremes, ie. neither very colored or very gray or neither very tight or very loose. .

The answers to these questions have implications on our methods and materials too. If for instance I want to paint highly colored bright impressionist pictures I would probably use a palette containing cadmiums and a pthalo blue. Is a teacher who recommends that I use earth colors wrong? No, but his palette is not going to help me do what I want to do.

I might want to paint roughly textured landscapes the size of a bedsheet in one shot. I probably wouldn't want to use red sable brushes and real amber medium. Sables and amber mediums aren't wrong, they are just not well suited to the purpose I intend. I would probably want to use big hogs hair brushes and an alkyd medium.

So it is good to weigh a teachers advice against what you are trying to do. When in a class, do it the teachers way and try out what they are suggesting, because that's the best way to learn from them. But when you go home, choose from their method that which suits you. But don't throw the rest away, the art you are making will evolve and you may need it later. Its very handy to know a lot of different ways to do things in painting. You may not need a particular technology today, but you might tomorrow.

Ask Stape; why not just work from photos?

Dear Stape;

I've been following your blog for a while now and while not a real 'painter' (I paint digitally, not with traditional medium), I still love reading your columns and advice.

My question is on this line of your last update entitled 'Take That':

"Learning to paint landscapes from a photo is like learning to swim at home on the sofa.

I'm wondering - why? Is it because our peripheral vision? I'm just trying to have a more complete understanding of this. I mean, is the photo of the landscape not the same as the landscape? (minus the obvious fact that it is cropped)? What are the benefits, etc? (outside of some nice fresh air!)

Signed; Morlock

Dear Morlock;

I could give you a lot of different technical reasons about depth of field and inaccurate color, cropping, the difficulty of creating that D which is three from D by two image. But there is one really, really good reason I can give you that will slay the beastie once and for all.

Can you imagine me saying " I was so moved by this lovely photograph that I painted this picture?" I didn't think so!
If I am outside on location I am experiencing the beauty of nature before me. I convey that through my paintings. I love this world and I want to do something with that. If you are working from a photo it is like doing a portrait of a cadaver. A painting from a photo is a design project or a cold rendering, but the spark and excitement of the experienced world is gone. If you get the same thrill from a photo as from life, you might as well marry a girlie magazine.
Art comes from passion and inspiration, that's why its called art and not mechanics.

That being said, there are times when photographs are useful. There are fleeting effects, posthumous portrait commissions (often of dogs for some weird reason) and places that are impossible to set up an easel. It is a different thing if you are a very experienced artist who has learned to paint outside, (which is where the landscape is stored). Painting a long time outside gives you a mental library of the moves that nature likes to make. I virtually never start a painting from a photograph, but I do take photos of the locations and sometimes use them while finishing in the studio. When I do, I never let the photo use me.

One of the problems with working from photos is that when I stand before the landscape I have binocular vision, I see that D which is three, I use a convention called "form" to mimic that experience. I can't do that from a photo. The colors in a photo are very different than what the eye perceives, I don't copy those colors but they are my starting point. Lastly even a 30 by 50 monitor is far smaller than the viewable image I get outside, its as big as the whole world.

When I am on painting trips I often am struck by a scene and I photograph it, thinking that it would make a great picture. When I get it home I am always surprised, it seems like the picture opportunity has evaporated somehow. I always think, "why did I take that, what did I think was there?".
...................................Stape