“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Too many compromises do sap your strength and energy, and the work compromise was inhibiting your painting to some extent. The focus upon compromise automatically forces you to withhold directness and energy in all of your pursuits. After a while despite yourself you take on to some extent the coloration and attitudes of others who live by compromise entirely, until your own clear-cut ideas and purposes seem more and more unrealistic.

There are several things you do not understand. I have not explained them. (Pause.) It could be Pinet (spelled). Also add a date: 1660. Now. There are a series of steps of stone, leading to a large building. Inside sculptors are working. Leo (my phonetic interpretation) is not there. There is a man vastly interested in the idea of coloring sculptures—the statues.

The pigment however is hard to prepare. The sculptors do not trust him. Some of the ingredients come from the hillsides—scooped earth. Some from herbs. The colors must be prepared differently than for frescos.

Florence. (In Italy.) The master wants to get the same feeling of bulk and three-dimensional weight and size from flat painting—molding color rather than rock. They think it cannot be done. He is fascinated by the concept.

Out of his desire he applies energy (gestures) and color over it, so that the paintings have then the reality he hopes for.

I do. He travels and learns. He also learns some secrets of color through the man mentioned earlier, and there is a binding agent in his work not recognized as such. A chemical technique learned.

You were indeed. You were the man who experimented with color, as applied however to sculpts. And one of your discoveries was of the binding agent adopted by the master painter in his work.

You were also close friends. You came from a different country, where the weathering effect upon statues was different. (Denmark? I hated to interrupt with a lot of questions. I thought we could fill in details in later sessions.) This is a long subject however. There was difficulty with varnishes, sometimes drying before the color upon which they were applied. Also varnishes that did not dry evenly, but with accumulations of oils resulting. On frescos this was disastrous enough.

Attempts to paint sculpts however that were often for outdoor use sometimes resulted not only in running together color, but in a mold that built up between layers of color.

Too much oil facilitated the growth of certain molds. Lead white often stopped the growth of the mold, but it was too harsh a color. The lead content stopped the mold.

You learned how to mix colors in such a way that they would dry uniformly, and to apply them in certain ways (with gestures, implying layers of color one over the other) to facilitate this drying.

(I also work, usually, with one color layer over another, rather than mixing them while wet. This maintains purity and clarity of color—and has been considered sound painting technique over the years.)

There was a varnish, finally, that you mixed in with some of the pigments after they were prepared, with the dry pigments after they were prepared, that served as a binding agent that also protected each color from the other one. There was a slight lead content mixed into the varnish.

(In those days, tubes for paints did not exist—all color had to be prepared fresh each day by the artist or assistants, from dry pigment. Varnish was often used as an ingredient in mediums. There are and were, many kinds of varnish. A slight lead content in a varnish sounds quite possible.)