What a beautiful experience of sharing colour with colour lovers!
This is what happened during the Colour Alchimia workshop at ABADIR - Accademia di Design e Arti Visive in Catania, Sicily, which took place from the 20 - 21 July, 2017. I am thrilled to share my story and the experience of teaching this workshop in the beautiful island, which makes it a unique place to be. It has this summer vibe near the Edna volcano.
The Abadir - Accademia di Design e Arti Visive is located in a 18th century restored palazzo full with rooms and original frescoes, which goes very in line with my workshops.
I have to highlight the space where the workshop was held.
It was a beautiful area used for ceramic courses and other lectures; it has an amazing garden full of citric trees.
I briefly taught the history of colour from Prehistory to the Renaissance, were ochre is considered to be the first colour ever used by humanity and how the Egyptians introduced new colours to the palette such as green and blues; how raw sienna was widely used during the Renaissance period by artists such as Caravaggio and Rembrandt.
This workshop was a mix between students and professionals from the art and design world, therefore interesting outputs resulted, from moodboard and collage making to fabric printing.
It was a 10-hour workshop divided in 2 days. The first day we experimented with the powerful and golden saffron colour; then with yellow ochre called raw sienna and red ochre and lastly with white from ostrich egg shells.
The second day we started
with the mysterious and dark lampblack pigment; continued with blue azurite and green
malachite. Participants were fascinated to see how from a stone and mineral they could extract powdered colour. It was beautiful to see the different blue and green shades as they grounded up the raw stone.
They really enjoyed all the processes but the lampblack in particular.
I can say it was true Alchemy using fire, water and earth to transform raw materials ‘materia prima’
into colour.
Each one created a beautiful
moodboard made up of various materials such as paper, fabric and wood swatches.
At the end they shared their experience; favourite colour and method.
And what I loved the most was that most of them said that ‘from now on they would look and appreciate colour in a different way, wanting to experiment and extract all the colours from nature’.
