Landscape-7

To the readers,

An old landscape

I did few landscape paintings in mid 90s when I was engaged in practice to make some tempera colors which was tempered with a synthetic binder. This was my experiment and basically treated with the earth based pigments to paint on paper, board or thin cloth pasted on board. At that time, as art material no acrylic based synthetic gum was available in the market as it is found today in abroad. So I usually applied synthetic adhesive which was available in the market as an essential industrial product.

I diluted this sticky gum with purified water (impurities free) as much it was needed and a thin white milky solution but transparent by character was kept in my studio to mix up pigments for hand grinding even I used it when I wanted to dilute the color-paste. The coloration with the brush-work put as thin layer after layer had no difficulties that generally could be possible to brush up smoothly if the stickiness of the binder was not being reduced to some extent. Since earth based ingredients are semi opaque or hundred percent opaque and have a body that I could easily manage it just like a semi transparent or semi opaque water-color treatment on paper, board or cloth, if it would be a silk it resulted good effects. Sometimes I sprayed this solution directly on the surface of the painting to improve the bonding capacity of the pigment with an L-shaped instrument which is called mouth spray. In my student life it was necessary to spray on artworks drawn in pencil or charcoal medium to protect the work because a ready-made spray can filled in with spirit based lacquer was not available in the market at that time.

So many long years back I painted on paper or cloth and ageing or cracks or natural damage found within a short period or later neither in past nor in the present days. Experimenting with various proportions of pigment and binder produce the different type of results of pigmentation, the effects that an artist needs to apply on the surface of the ground effectively though it differs in comparison to others such as egg tempera, egg oil emulsion, tempera treated in animal glue, oil or acrylic. Those artists who are habituated to work in a way to treat the acrylic mixing it with powdered color to convert it into matt effects, usually they apply this Fevicol or any synthetic adhesive proportionally so that the bonding strength shall keep it up to avoid brittleness. For the effect of impasto  proportionally surplus adhesive (binder) that artist should measure and test how much it requires to mix up with how much pigment, also a hard surface requires to avoid cracks, peeling off when it will be drying. In this case it has a risk factor and needed an experiment before the last execution.

I called it gum tempera as a beautiful medium that always mentioned in the tag and catalogue. Obviously I am not only the one who did it, also so many artists use this synthetic gum as a binder for their tempera works. This gum is called in the brand name ‘Fevicol’ available in different categories of different strength produced by the ‘Pidilite Industries’, an up growing company for synthetic adhesive and color manufacturer for painting on fashion garments which is directly applied on cloth even on the leather product and after ironing it looks brighter and shining. In mid 90s I worked in a liaison office of USA based fashion designing company where this Fevicryl color was used for painting on the surface of the leather products and after an ageing finally it looked very nice.

Nilotpal Sinha    Landscape-7    Gum Tempera on board     15 ” x 13 ”    1995