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December 03, 2003

pigment white 6

So I make the marks. I commit paint to the panel.
And I leave it.
And I look at it.
And I look at it again.
Then I look at it some more.
Then, just to make sure, I look a bit longer.
And then there’s Titanium White.

Titanium White: pigment white 6 [77891]
Lightfastness: ASTM D4302/1.
an inorganic synthetic opaque white.
TiO2, titanium dioxide, produced from ferrous illmenite by a sulphate process, or [indeed] from rutile ore by the chloride process.
It is slow drying, absolutely inert and permanent.

In there somewhere is the key to its usefulness: it's opaque.
Opaque adj. not transparent or translucent, impenetrable to light.
And I paint the glorious buttery white opaque paste over the panel, over the marks, obscuring the disturbing imagery, scraping it off again to reveal parts that, maybe, on reflection, weren’t perhaps that bad after all. And, with all the misintention of twelfth century Lindisfarne Monks, traces of the old marks show through, and a history begins.

Posted by john at December 3, 2003 10:31 PM

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