COLOR GEEK JOY!

My daughter and me and the Gamblin Wall O'Colors in their offices.

Dave Bernard shows my daughter Gamblin's range of colors.

So, since we were going to Portland OR, my daughter and I booked a tour at the Gamblin oil paint factory. I dearly love their website and use and recommend it often for ever so much good and reliable information about color, transparency, pigments, mediums, palettes, history, etc. etc. etc. They are very generous about sharing in-depth information (without ever spilling over into unintelligible, full-blown chemistry.) All my geeky tendencies get fed regularly there. I was ridiculously excited to go see how they do what they do.

Turns out it is a family business, run by personable folks in a tidy warehouse down by the river and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. A very welcoming, kind fellow, Dave Bernard, met us at the door, and spent a happy hour with us. We shared all kinds of hugely opinionated (me), geeky views on color mixing and usage, and he showed us the whole process of making artists' oil colors.

We started with stacks of sacks of deliciously colorful powdered pigments from all over the globe, labeled with bright finger smudges of color, and moved on through mixing, milling, testing, filling, labeling, and shipping. Ironically, the colors they were making, while we were there, were not ones I use--Manganese Purple, f’nstance--but hey, it was fun to see it being combined with linseed oil in giant, culinary-looking mixers, expertly milled on rollers, getting its viscosity test, and passing into the tube-fill machine in rich, gooey globs, like some radiant grape jelly.

Thank you, Dave, and friends, for sharing your expertise and showing a couple of enthusiasts your fiefdom. I love squeezing out my palette every day and knowing where so much of it comes from, and how it got to me (even if I am never sure exactly how it will turn out on my canvas!).

This is how my day begins!