Pigments & Paintings
Fugitive art & Mixed Media Creations
Paintings and pigments made from the living world.
Beyond the perfume bench, I paint. And before I paint, I make the paint. Ochre and stone foraged from the high desert and ground by hand; color drawn out of wild plants and laked into pigment, ink, watercolor, and oil.
Many pigments come from the ground I live on. Others are sourced from around the world — including a box of rare, traditional, and sometimes banned pigments I’ve inherited from the artists in my family…a nod from the universe that this is in my DNA ;)
These pigments behave the way living things do — some colors holding for millennia, some slipping away within a human life. I've stopped treating the fading as a flaw. It's the material telling the truth about time.
Making Paint from plants & stones
Pigment-making is its own art, and one of the oldest we have. Grinding stone into powder, charring wood and bone to black, laking fugitive color out of petals and leaves, mulling it all into a usable paint — this is slow art. Long before a brush touches paper, the medicine is already in the material.
On Art & Ecology
We learn a landscape differently when we make your colors from it. Foraging ocher means reading a hillside — where the iron bleeds through, which seam runs red and which runs gold. Laking pigment from rabbitbrush means knowing exactly when it blooms, and noticing, year over year, when the bloom comes early. Natural materials make you a tracker. They tie art to a specific place and a specific season, and they register what's changing — a harvest that arrives weeks ahead of schedule, a plant grown harder to find, a color the warming season no longer gives. The process becomes a record of the living world and its disruptions. To make art this way is to enter relationship with the living Earth as a being rather than a backdrop — and relationship is where stewardship begins. We protect what we are in conversation with.
True Botanical alchemy
Where the atelier meets the studio
When I distill a plant for its hydrosol — the aromatic water that carries its scent and spirit — I keep what most would pour out. I take that distillation water, or “tea”, and use it to extract pigment into paint. I then mull the plant’s pigment with it’s aromatic water, so the color body and the fragrant essence become one material.
In this way, the final paint contains the entire essence of the plant through layers of alchemical distillation.
Ritual art
I build a painting the way I build a perfume. Every material is chosen twice — once for its aesthetics, and once for its resonance, its frequency, and its archetypal signature.
A single postcard-sized painting might hold the essences of amethyst and tourmaline, beach ocher, wild rose, bone, and poppy — each lending its frequency to the finished piece, received by whoever sits with it.
The paintings are done intuitively. Asemic strokes and color fields guided by the pigments themself.
The result is a ritual object: a charged field of color for an altar, a wall.
Art with resonance
We know scent slips past the thinking mind — a single note can drop us into a memory. Color does the same work through a different door. A painting can reach beneath conscious thought and put us in touch with something truer than what we perceive on the surface.
This is why I choose pigments for frequency as much as for hue. Each selection tunes the field the way a base note tunes a perfume. You don't need to understand a color to be moved by it. You only have to sit with it long enough to let it bring you under your surface — and let it remind you of what you already know.
The long work: pigment & perfume
All of this feeds a larger, ongoing project pairing ritual perfumes with paintings made from the same plants and earth — scent and color drawn from one source, composed to move energy and lift consciousness. Two art forms, the same devotion: coaxing beauty from living things, and letting each keep the lifespan its own material decides.
Paintings, ritual objects, and pigment-and-perfume commissions are available periodically and by inquiry. Get in touch.
Style is a Moving Target
I don't keep a single style. My work ranges from loose abstract washes to representational pieces, depending on what the materials and the moment ask for. While I love the art of pigment making, I work with a wide variety of materials in my practice — the dance of synthetic and natural reflecting that very real titration of earth technology we all experience each day
I follow the muses rather than a signature look — which is either an artist statement or a confession…
But to be fair, I do seem to create a lot of landscapes and birds ;)
