Subscription Center
October 20, 2011
| 
2
Glendon Mellow is a fine artist and illustrator inspired by evolutionary biology working in oil and digital media. He moderates the ScienceArt Circle community on G+. Glendon's Portfolio is at glendonmellow.com, and work-in-progress blog is at The Flying Trilobite. Find him on Google+.
Follow solo on Twitter at @flyingtrilobite, or Follow on Twitter @symbiartic.
Technology in art supplies moves fast, and there are tons of amazing ways to enable new creative explorations appearing all the time. Wacom Inkling Pen. Lytro Light-Field Cameras. Terraskin paper made from stone.
Hyperferrule brain-to-glove painting device. © Glendon Mellow. Any steampunk inventor/neurosurgeons out there want to co-manufacture these with me, gimme a call.
Innovations, especially digital ones, leave a swath of devastatingly outdated art materials in their wake. The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies curated by Lou Brooks is there to document those left behind by trends and utility.
What about art supplies that are unchanging and (as close as you can get to) eternal in the human experience?
Last week, our SciAm blog peep Gozde Zorlu on Creatology reported on an amazing discovery. As chronicled in a study in Science, archaeologists led by Christopher Henshilwood of the universities of Bergen and Wiwatersrand found what appears to be a 100,ooo year old ochre workshop in a South African cave. (Make sure to read Gozde’s post Stone Age Art Kit Found in South African Cave for photos and a link to a 60-second podcast!)
Along with umber and sienna, ochre pigments are among the earliest shades used for mark-making. They come from clays, and can range from yellowish-brown to reddish-brown and are also non-toxic. The abstract at Science also describes charcoal being found in the cave with the other supplies.
Both charcoal and ochre pigments (in watercolour, acrylic and oil paint; in pastel pencils, and Conte sticks) can be found on almost any foundation-year course list in leading art colleges today.
If you look closely enough, you'll find some stone age pigments mixing with modern chemistry.
Charcoal and ochre: are there other art supplies that have stood the test of time, and accompanied creative humans in our path from the stone age to the digital age?
About the Author: Glendon Mellow is a fine artist and illustrator inspired by evolutionary biology working in oil and digital media. He moderates the ScienceArt Circle community on G+. Glendon's Portfolio is at glendonmellow.com, and work-in-progress blog is at The Flying Trilobite. Find him on Google+.
Follow solo on Twitter at @flyingtrilobite, or Follow on Twitter @symbiartic.
Rights & Permissions
2 Comments
Add a Comment
You must sign in or register as a ScientificAmerican.com member to submit a comment.
Click one of the buttons below to register using an existing Social Account.
We Fit Nature to Us: Evolution's 2-Way Street
Discover the Secret of the 17-Year Cicada, But It Won’t Get You Tenure
Why Portland Is Wrong About Water Fluoridation
The Moon has it all: Explosions, Water, and Clues to the Grand Tack
Pirates, Charles Darwin, and One Very Un-Extinct Dodo
U.S. Hurricane Forecasts Could Be Better
See what we're tweeting about
DrJudyStone NYPD data: Whites much more likely to be carrying drugs and guns than minorities
http://t.co/MLjis3S2TE #racialprofiling
sciammind Brain's Glial Cells Spark Seizures http://t.co/ENiAUq7Ec6 sciammind Illusion of the week: It Kind Of Looks Like a Building http://t.co/66rxe0Pz9n
YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific American with no obligation to continue the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed for the one-year subscription.
Share
Email
Print
You may like to know that Curtis Marean, at ASU, has been working in southern Africa for many years and discovered some of the first early remains of pigments.
Fitting nicely with his research and the group you mentioned is a recent paper in PNAS. Titled “Hunter-gatherer genomic diversity suggests a southern African origin for modern humans”. Check it out — the abstract and conclusion is an easy read.
Does anyone received an Inkling from Wacom? It was schedules to ship mid-September and then changed to mid-October. I have a preorder with Amazon as advised by Wacom. If anyone knows the real story OR if the Inkling is real Please add your comment.
Link to thisThanks Lynn! Great resource there. The use of pigments must go back pretty far in human prehistory and it’d be a thrill to be able to put some dates on that. I’m fascinated we still use them in mostly the same form, at least for part of the palette.
In a quick search, the only review of the Inkling I could find that wasn’t by a Wacom employee was by 3D World magazine, when Wacom employees came to their offices to demo it: http://www.3dworldmag.com/2011/09/13/wacom-inkling-demo-and-review/
So it looks like no one has received one yet.
Link to this