Listen to this Story Narrated by Stephanie Krzywonos Contributor Bios Writer Stephanie Krzywonos is a Xicana nonfiction writer. Her forthcoming debut book is Ice Folx, an intersectional memoir set in the Antarctic underworld. She has written about her experiences on “the Ice” for Sierra Magazine, Ofrenda Magazine, The Willowherb Review, Kosmos Journal, The Dark Mountain Project, The Behemoth, and The Antarctic Sun. Artist Studio Airport, founded by Bram Broerse and Maurits Wouters, is an interdisciplinary design studio that ventures out into the cultural ether to forage for anomalies, creating work that spans art, culture, science, and ecology. In addition to Emergence Magazine, their creative partners include the Design Museum, See All This Art Magazine, Slowness, Normal Phenomena of Life, and Sapiens Magazine. They are master tutors at the Design Academy Eindhoven and were recognized as European Agency of the Year 2024 by the EDA.
From ochre to lapis lazuli, Stephanie Krzywonos opens a door into the entangled histories of our most iconic pigments, revealing how colors hold stories of both lightness and darkness.
“If one could only catch that true color of nature. The very thought of it drives me mad.” —Andrew Wyeth
Prehistoric cave painting, Grotte de Font-de-Gaume Courtesy of Olivier Huard
OCHRE
Darkness filled Font-de-Gaume cave. But dark is not the same as the color black. Dark means little or no light. Black isn’t an absence, but a presence. Font-de-Gaume contains the only polychromatic prehistoric cave art still open to the public. Lascaux, fourteen miles away, closed to visitors in 1963: the carbon dioxide and humidity from human sweat and breath was damaging the paintings. Outside the cave in daylight, large beige-grey marbled cliffs overhung the habitable cottages of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac and the ruins of human shelters around 40,000 years old. Here, in 1868, a geologist uncovered the bones of five Cro-Magnon skeletons, which, at the time, were the earliest known examples of Homo sapiens sapiens—us. Homo sapiens, in Latin, means the wise human. Inside the cave, 250 earth-colored images of reindeer, bison, woolly mammoths, ibexes, horses, and a wolf haunted the walls. Most of the animals were outlined in thick black lines and filled in with rich, earthy ochre paint. Pigment, a form of nature, is an insoluble substance that gives color to paint and other materials. The melanin in hair, skin, and eyes is a pigment, so is the chlorophyll in plants. Ochre—found decorating 350,000-year-old paleolithic bones—is the oldest colored pigment used by humans. In 2008, archaeologists discovered a 100,000-year-old painting kit in a cave in South Africa which included ochre pigments, an abalone shell used as a palette, a stone for grinding, and bone spatulas for mixing and dabbing the paste. Ochre is life in the form of a paste. To make it, gather earth, specifically clay or rock from land rich in mineral oxides. If not already a powder, crush it, then mix with liquid like fish oil, animal fat, blood, or saliva. Ochre’s iron oxides vary in color, from pale yellow to brown and red, but the oldest documented ochre pigment is red. In the languages of the many ancient Aboriginal cultures who used ochre, there is no distinction between ochre’s color and its substance, ancestral land. We still use red ochre in lipstick. In the cave, our guide, Blaise, told us that experts thought the artist, or artists, intended these paintings for worship, reverence, and ceremony and painted on scaffolding by the flickering light of reindeer fat. Blaise also told us the artists were tall and dark-skinned—we would call them Black. As a so-called “person of color,” this intrigued me. Our battery-powered light was steady and still as it illuminated a bison placed so precisely that the natural lumpiness of the rock wall made its bulk look real. Blaise asked us to imagine how the movement of the flames would have made the animals look alive, their muscles rippling and quivering on a canvas made of rock. In front of me, a female reindeer kneeled, and a male tenderly licked her forehead. The image was around 16,000 years old. Between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago, as the planet warmed and our last ice age ended, all of the reindeer in these paintings retreated northward with glaciers or were hunted to extinction. Blaise asked us to stand near a different wall, then turned on a light. An outline of an artist’s hand was inches from my face. The hand seemed to pulse. Maybe it was just my heart pumping blood behind my eyes. The artist had filled his mouth with the same ochre used to color the animals, held up his large left hand, then sprayed ochre paint against the wall. Whose blood, whose spit, whose fat was this? The artist could have been hunting, been doing anything else in sunlight, but chose to enter the dark to paint, to love what is, to record a reindeer kiss forever, or for as long as rock lasts. These artists didn’t just try to capture what they loved—they left a warning. One motif in prehistoric cave art, Blaise said, was to paint the most dangerous, violent animals in the deepest part of the cave. We were not allowed to travel deeper inside of Earth to see them: Font-de-Gaume, this museum of prehistoric art, was re-discovered in 1901, and already people had destroyed too many paintings. The animals in the very back were a woolly rhinoceros, a lion, and the profile of a human face, on which a tear appears to fall. Maybe, as reindeer herds dwindled, the artists were expressing their sorrow and regret. Perhaps the face is saying: if we are not wise, our loves can lead down hideous paths.
Bone char made from pyrolyzed animal bones Courtesy of Scott Bagley
BONE BLACK
In some ways, black, the color of outer space, is the most primordial pigment. The first black pigments we used came from the hearth: scorched wood and animals. Charred bones make an especially rich black. The black lines that give Font-de-Gaume’s reindeer their shapes and structure likely came from the bones of the very animals the images depicted. In 2,650 BC, Egyptians used bone black to paint Perneb’s tomb; Rembrandt, Velázquez, Manet, and Picasso all used it. Renoir confessed: “I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.” Bone black is 10 to 20% carbon; calcium makes up the rest. To make bone black, remove all fat, muscle, and tendons from the bones and roast in high heat while starving them of oxygen. Once made by hand by the artists who used this pigment, bone black later became mass produced. By the mid-nineteenth century, Western attitudes toward the animals who were the source of bone black had become extractivist to the extreme. As the near genocide of the North American continent’s estimated sixty million bison was almost complete, companies like Michigan Carbon Works cooked bison skeletons into bone black as pigment, fertilizer, and a purifier and filter for sugar. At one point, it was estimated that only three hundred bison survived. There were various reasons why the bison were slaughtered: one of them was to starve Indigenous peoples into submission. Settlers in the west were paid to gather and send bison bones back east via the new railroads. One mid-1870s photo shows two men posing, one on top of and one casually leaning against a mountain of 180,000 neatly stacked bison skulls. By the late nineteenth century, Michigan Carbon Works was the largest industry in Detroit. “As buffalo bones on the prairie became scarce, scavengers began to raid Indian Burial Grounds for bones,” their website says. “A great rift was created in the industry and human bones became a source for their arguments. Finally, all human bones were unacceptable for the bone industry.” Bone black is the presence of an absence. In the 1960s, the Ebonex Corporation bought the bone black division of Michigan Carbon Works. “Bones no longer come from the prairies, but tradition is upheld when charred animal bones are milled and blended to create bone black pigments,” Ebonex says on its website. “Each grade of pigment is created with pride, and followed with excellent customer service.” Today, most commercial white sugar is purified using bone char, and you can still buy bone black pigment for your art projects made from cows and pigs. Black paint made from ivory has a higher carbon content, so the depth and intensity of its black is highly prized. To make ivory black, mix ground charred ivory—tusks, teeth—in oil. Ivory black is no longer made commercially because of the expense and near extinction of its sources.
Juglet from an Egyptian tomb, ca. 1750–1640 BC Metropolitan Museum of Art
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