"Is that ...dust"? Jonathan asked as he looked out the window.

It was December 30, 2021, a bright and windy morning between Christmas and New Years. I stepped into the airy living room in our third-story apartment, which had walls of windows in three directions. The Rocky Mountains stretched across the west, a view of the road leading to the nearby town of Superior, Colorado ran from the south, and nestled between them, were the trees of Downtown Louisville, Colorado. Jonathan had just begun to make the morning French press coffee as he pulled up the shades to let in the sunlight. His arm stopped in mid-motion, and his gaze was fixed out of one of the big windows toward the mountains. "I can't tell if that's dust... or smoke," He said. "Here, take a look--out there to the west," and added, "You can't miss it."

We had moved to Louisville (pronounced Lou-is-ville) earlier that year. Before moving, I had made a video interview about my passion for lost knowledges, especially as they relate to painting and color theory. I had created about 800 pages of handwritten research on painting and pigments which had transformed my painting practice. Some of the sources for the research had since disappeared- as they sometimes do in the internet age- and I had been working on organizing this important information by hand. Since then, along with painting portraits, I had mixed and tubed about a thousand hand-calibrated mixtures of oil paints based on a historical color atlas. I had just finished that enormous color mixing project not long before Christmas, along with starting a new series of large-scale paintings.

I stepped toward the window where Jonathan had been, and saw what had caught his eye- there was a brown column rising into the air. "That's smoke," I said.

We kept an eye on the growing cloud in the west, and thought the fire would surely be put out. Meanwhile, angry bursts of wind blew over filled garden planters and banged dumpster doors on the ground below. The cloud at first was brown, then blue-black. At times there were alternating puffs of greasy black, and at times it was haloed with a nasty sulphur-yellow. The cloud began to overtake the sky. I paced the living room and watched now to the west, now to the south as the situation developed. Jonathan attentively scanned social media for updates. The whole western sky had been swallowed by an advancing, choking cloud of oppressive slate blue which loomed over our apartment. Fast forward to a few hours later when in a nightmare situation, the fire, driven by 100-mile-an-hour winds, devestated everything in its path.

As the smoke cloud grew, I began to pack up some of the recently-finished tubes of paint, purely out of what I thought at the time was an abundance of caution. Heart pounding, and trying not to breathe the acrid air too deeply, I had raced them down three and a half flights of stairs to our car only to pound through another three and a half flights back up, and then repeat the process all over again. Confronted with the thought that I might need to save some more belongings from the smoke, I grabbed a couple of rare color atlases and the four volumes of the Great Book of Color, about 800 handwritten pages of my research.

Even though it was midday, our apartment grew dark. The town of Superior had been evacuated. I gazed at the steady bumper-to-bumper string of headlights coming from the south- the 35,000 evacuees from Superior. My head throbbed as the toxic smoke filled our apartment. Our windows creaked in the angry wind. "I think we need to go," I said, not knowing that something had gone wrong with our official evacuation notices and we did indeed need to go. We sadly taped a sign on the hallway-facing door of our apartment for the first responders who might need to clear our building and locked the door behind us. A video of other dramatic evacuaation scenes that gives an accurate an impression of what it felt like that morning can be found here. After we had left, a mandatory evacuation order was issued for our location. Evacuation notices appeared on social media from the Chief of Police and Fire Command. Then we read a dire confirmation on what was then Twitter, "If you're in Louisville, this is a life threatening situation. LEAVE NOW!" from the National Weather Service.

We didn't know at that time that this was the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history, that two people had lost their lives, and that thousands of pets perished, while over a thousand homes and businesses were destroyed and countless others were damaged. We didn't know then that so many other people who were in fact under mandtaory evacuation also hadn't received notices, or that it was only because of the incredible bravery and selflessness of the first responders who put themselves at risk to save others that so many peoples' lives were saved.

As far as our little apartment was concerned, a toxic cocktail of chemical smoke and ash, driven by hurricane-force winds, contaminated everything except for what we were able to take with us when we evacuated-- and one of those few things was the Great Book of Color. Before the Marshall Fire I had been metabolizing a series of losses- discoveries about my mom, dad, and sibling, and was faced with the reality that they were not who I thought they were. These revelations were borne out after the fire in relation to some of my paintings. I had to dig deep, and in that process discovered what it was that I truly wanted to share with the world.

In the Marshall Fire, nearly all of my paintings up to that time were lost to smoke damage. (A bizarre story unfolded regarding what later happened to a handful of my paintings that I had hoped I could save, but which were in fact impacted by the fumes and smoke. It seems that some the ones which had been carefully wrapped did sadly end up having exposure to the chemicals from the fire after all. Strangely, some of these may have survived after I later paid to dispose of them, which was an exceedingly surprising turn of events). Only one, described below, survived almost unscathed due to a specialized art box.

The moment of evacuation, when I was confronted with nearly losing all of the research along with everything else, proved to be a catalyst. That experience illuminated how fragile the transmission of knowledge can be and clarified the importance of sharing this knowledge with fellow artists. And naturally I have also begun to paint.

As a portrait artist, so much attention is given to the details of the face. Everything has to be just right. The fundamentals recorded in my notebooks enabled me to level up on this painting, which is shared as an example of how all of this comes to bear on one's artistic practice. I was thrilled when this painting was nominated for consideration for the BP Portrait Show in 2020, and I was invited to ship it to the National Gallery in London. While the painting did not ultimately become part of the show, by an incredible turn of events, the intense packing and in particular the double-boxed Airfloat box I had purchased for it ended up protecting this work from the Marshall Fire smoke. Out of all of my work it is the one piece from before the fire that I still have.

During the time between art school and now, as I became a professional painter, I have become increasingly concerned with lost knowledge in the arts. Clearly, we are in a time of technological upheaval, and that some mediums of knowledge-sharing are more at risk for disappearing than others. In the early to mid 2000s, an interesting medium for sharing experiences with art materials arose as painters came together in forums. Artists, conservators, and materials experts shared decades of experience with materials, and many of those repositories of collective knowledge are now gone. One of the major resources was led by a former head of the ASTM (the American Society for Testing and Materials - the subcommittee for artist materials, on which I currently serve). When that resource disappeared a valuable treasure trove was lost.

When I found a Munsell forum filled with practicing painters, I learned as much as I could with the intuition that like so many other valuable online resources, the forum may not last forever. I added the comments of the great painters to my Pigment Notebook. I visited university special archives. I ordered rare books from Interlibrary Loan, some of which were in French. I consulted expensive volumes written by European conservators. I visited museum shows. I filled the Great Book of Color with conversations from pigment experts, conservators, authors and chemists I'd met as well as my own observations from twenty years of painting. This became Volume 1 of the Great Book of Color. Pigment knowledge is for every artist, and I believe that together we can all learn more.

There is much more to the Great Book of Color than can be included in any one article. Pigment knowledge is foundational to art practice, and all painters everywhere need to understand the materials they work with. Two resources which I strongly suggest you consult while they are still here are the work of David G. Myers at Artiscreation.com and the Artist's Guide to Watercolor Pigments by Bruce MacEvoy at handprint.com. There is a lot of conflicting information about pigments, however these are two sources that provided the foundation for my own understanding, which has been supplemented by countless other books. I advise you to build your understanding in the same way-- by consulting many sources. In other words, I would not advise relying solely on what is found here, as there is always much more to learn and this is an evolving discipline.

My voice, and the Great Book of Color, are just one in a much larger chorus, and I urge everyone who reads from the Great Book of Color to conduct their own research. For example, there are several disciplines from which painters need to seek information for themselves. I must also add that my expertise is as a painter-- for example, I'm not a toxicologist, nor a chemist, nor a conservator, so please seek that guidance from the relevant professionals. Painters benefit from conversing with experts in a number of disciplines. Leonardo Da Vinci once famously said that "Art is the queen of the sciences," and it makes sense that artists need to familiarize themselves with several branches of sciences simultaneously. In fact he went further and said, "Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world."

As a quick pigment reference, I have created a brief guide to artists pigments where a person can look up information, which is based on some of the pigments in the Great Book of Color. It's called Unlocking the Palette with the Pigment List, A Painter's Secret Superpower.

The Great Book of Color is a distillation of the wisdom of the painters. What follows in this article is a taste of some of the topics The Great Book of Color contains along with some of why the fundamentals are important to share.

In the book, I also created many paint swatches for recent and historical paint colors with a myriad of pigments. The Pigment Notebook also contains Munsell Data, information from little-known schools of thought on realistic painting practice, and the craft of mixing one's own true Neutral greys as well as how to use them.

The legendary Gunzorro, also known as Jim Harris, once wrote of a "Fairly Stable Rainbow." It is in pursuit of that rainbow and the quest to explore every area of the palette that I began the journey into creating what would become the Pigment Notebook. My hope is that it will in some way aid your exploration of the palette, too. Here on Paint List, we'll continue to share excerpts in the form of articles on the pigments themselves.

What follows is a brief overview of some of the elements contained in the Great Book of Color starting with photos of both common and rare pigments in artists paints.

For oil painters, there are a couple of areas of the pigment world which matter greatly to us, but which are less-relevant to some other industries which use the same materials. For example, some pigment information is more oriented toward industrial coatings, ceramics, or other applications.

For painters elements such as precise surface color, lightfastness, reactions with various mixing whites, the interaction of the binding oil and pigment, and whether the pigment forms stable paint films (i.e. one wishes to avoid cracking or reliquification), the color mixing behavior, and color complementaries are all of importance.

In this constantly growing work-in-progress, I set out to find the various pieces of knowledge about pigments which are most relevant to painters. This began in my own painting practice and I believe it is of immense value for other painters as well.

Color is such a subjective experience that shared frameworks for describing it become important to painters. The Munsell System in particular has been of immense value to me in structuring my thought and language around color, as has CIE LAB and CIELch models. The point of using LAB or Munsell is not to get overly technical, but rather to communicate concretely about colors with a shared context and frame of reference. Many paint colors are actually out of gamut for screens, so pictures cannot be relied upon to convey color knowledge. The Great Book of Color documents the ongoing journey of using color systems to understand and clarify language about color as a painter and apply it practically to painting.

The Great Book of Color contains not just my own journey with brands, but also includes listening to a great many other painters. When setting out to discover the world of oil paints, a lot of the discussion focuses around brand names and the reputations of various paintmakers. There is no substitute for one's own experience, but listening to the great painters weigh in on their experiences was invaluable. To this I added my own, and eventually developed a knowledge of brands through custom-mixing and tubing a thousand colors. However, that project came later and was informed by this background of expertise. The research gleaned over the years in the Great Book of Color also informs what we share in brand reviews on the Paint List, such as our recent review of Williamsburg.

All white paints have their benefits and drawbacks. In the Great Book of Color the various studies on white paints as well as their behaviors are discussed and the experiences of various painters, experts, and chemists are discussed. Unfortunately, no white paint is perfect and there are many tradeoffs when choosing a white paint for a given application. Whether it's the early embrittlement of zinc, the softness of titanium, or the yellowing and toxicity of lead, the quest for a better white paint is ongoing.

What nobody saw coming was that certain pigments behave unexpectedly in all of the above white colors. See Golden's Lightfastness Research for the latest. I made the Great Book of Color and then co-founded the Paint List to help sort through this information and apply it cogently to my painting practice. My hope is that it will empower your painting practice, too.

One of the things I explored in the Great Book of Color had to do with historical paints. Legend, lore and song attend some of these paints, and I was also curious about the various hints and anecdotes told by older painters. Many of these paints are still available on the secondary market (such as ebay) and some still linger around in old paintboxes. To study these historical paints I purchased many of them myself and included them in my swatches throughout the Great Book of Color. New research is going on regarding 20th century oil paints and whether they will be stable throughout the centuries to come. I love to hear from conservators and will continue to integrate their findings into the ongoing work that is the Pigment Notebook.

As a very basic resource, I've compiled a list of pigments used in artists' paints. (Oil, Acrylic, and Watercolor but not Gouache yet).

It's called Unlocking the Palette with the Pigment List: A Painter's Secret Superpower. This is a basic lookup with all the pigments in one list so you can just do a Command+F or Ctrl+F on Windows to look up the pigment codes found on the back of your paints. From there you can begin to research them and also supplement this with information from artiscreation.com or handprint. Where we have further resources published on Paint List for a pigment, those will be linked to the Unlocking the Palette pigment list.

Also check out the paint review articles, and as always, Happy Painting!