Copy and Paste
Humans love to talk, Douglas Adams mused that if we didn’t our brains would freeze up. Of course, a lot of what we have to say is disagreed with by others, even when we’re right, which is why we probably find dancing so incredible to watch - two people communicating in unison for longer than 2 minutes.
Psychologists love to talk and to write, and then to talk and write about how wrong other psychologists are. For instance some say the human race should be called Homo Imitans - man the copyist - versus Homo Sapien - man the thinker. They view us less as having original thought and more inclined to copy others. Some even argue that imitating is instinctual - built into our bones if you like. Which is probably why we all look alike (this is species reasoning).
Naturally there are other opposing views but today I have decided they are all wrong and we are a bunch of copiers, especially those in marketing or the desperate for likes on social media.
Now that we have talked about copy, let’s put that aside for now and talk about paste. For the Latin buffs, you will know that the word for paste is pastellus, which actually sounds like a breakout of acne to me, but we’ll settle for paste. From pastellus we get pasta and dough, maybe the dough comes before the pasta or maybe dough not. From pasta we get the word pastel - which means… um… paste… unless you are French where it means crayon.
Speaking of France… they have been copying recipes for thousands of years, at least when it comes to art and they started with paste, which was not crayons and shouldn’t be eaten.
Somewhere in the south west of France, before it was called France, there are some caves called Lascaux. There the ancestors of the impressionists mixed red ochre with the calcified cave water into a paste and by the studio lights of their time usng their horse hair brushes, rags, flints and early spray painting implements created works of beauty.
These long lasting paintings were pasted on the walls using pastels. Actually, I think of these artists as the forerunners of startups - who also like to begin in basements with rudimentary equipment and grand ideas.
However, let’s skip forward a few thousand years to the time of Leonardo Da Vinci, who wandered into France and was captivated by a new method of portrait painting using pastels.
In order to quickly do as many portraits as possible one clever artist had switched from oil paints to pastels and discovered not only could he crack out the work and get paid more quickly, his subjects loved the soft, attractive skin tones pastels produced.
And so, the business of mixing pigments with chalk and gummy binders took off. This was the business not of homo imitans but homo sapiens as creating colour is as much chemistry as it is alchemy… maybe its not alchemy at all but the colours do have a magic of their own.
A chemist ended up taking over the oldest pastel making house in France and his name was Henri Roche. Which he then added to his pastels. He experimented with all sorts of pigments and took the colour range from 100 to 500. His son came on for an encore and lifted that number to 1650 colours.
Why so many pastels? Well, they are opaque and while having the same pigments as oil paints they can’t be mixed in the same way as oils and so artists love to have one of every shade they can think of to get the image they want.
Today the pastel house Henri Roche bought is still going, run by two ladies who do everything from making the pastels to selling them. There’s an amazing video on them on YouTube and I’ll link it below - great story of following a passion for paste.
Okay so, I’ve copied and pasted pictures and links and come to the end of this post.
Clearly I love pastels and you can find me streaming live from the studio, working the paste on YouTube at David Ketchen - Pastel Art
May you find joy in whatever you copy this week, perhaps paste a photo into a substack note or even better go to the local art store and buy some pastels (please don’t use them in your local cave).
Wishing you peace
David Ketchen
hmmmm… I had no idea pastels had such a rich (and sticky) history!
From a tech perspective, Innovation often starts with imitation and then takes a wild leap forward.
Love the journey through history and creativity David.
What a fascinating history - I had no idea! It’s so much fun to learn something new!