We tend to look at paintings without asking where the colour actually came from. But behind every brushstroke sits a story.
Some pigments were once worth more than gold, others were dug from the earth and used before humans had even invented writing. Once you know these stories, you start to see paintings differently, including the ones hanging on the walls of contemporary galleries today. At Hancock Gallery in Newcastle, that history is still very much alive in how our artists choose their palettes.
Ultramarine: the colour worth more than gold
Ultramarine has one of the most dramatic origin stories in art history. It was made by grinding lapis lazuli, a semi precious stone mined almost exclusively in a single region of Afghanistan, then shipped across the sea to Europe. That journey is where the name comes from, ultramarine literally means "beyond the sea".
Because the raw material was so rare and the process of purifying it was so labour intensive, ultramarine was, for centuries, more expensive than gold by weight. Painters and their patrons treated it accordingly. It was reserved for the most sacred subjects, most famously the robes of the Virgin Mary, and its use in a commission was often a visible sign of a patron's wealth and devotion. A painter might negotiate separately for how much ultramarine they were permitted to use.
Vermeer took this further than almost anyone. He used ultramarine not just for a robe or a sky, but in his shadows and underpainting, places no viewer would ever see, at a cost that would have alarmed his patrons had they known. Girl with a Pearl Earring owes much of its glow to this extravagance. Titian was another famous devotee, prized for the depth he could achieve by layering ultramarine to build up his blues.
Everything changed in the 1820s with the invention of synthetic ultramarine, a stable and far cheaper alternative that made the colour available to artists of every income. What had once been an emblem of luxury became, almost overnight, an everyday studio staple. Van Gogh was among those who benefited, mixing the newly affordable synthetic blues with earth tones and bold yellows to convey emotion across around 15 tube pigments.
Photo by The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Unsplash
Ochre: the pigment older than civilisation
If ultramarine tells a story of scarcity and status, ochre tells the opposite one. Ochre is an iron oxide pigment, quite literally coloured earth, and it is one of the oldest pigments used by humans. Traces of ochre have been found in cave paintings tens of thousands of years old, long before anyone had a word for "art".
Unlike ultramarine, ochre did not need to be imported from distant lands or ground from precious stone. It was abundant, easy to source and available across almost every inhabited continent, which is part of why it became one of humanity's first tools for expression. From those prehistoric walls, ochre made its way steadily into the fine art tradition, where it remains a foundational earth tone in countless palettes today.
Photo by The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Unsplash
Cézanne leaned heavily on ochre and other earth tones to build the structure of his landscapes, using them almost like architecture rather than decoration. Centuries earlier, Rembrandt built entire portraits from a similarly narrow, earthy palette, proof that restraint with colour can be as powerful as extravagance.
Why pigment stories still matter today
Understanding where a colour comes from gives you a way into a painting that has nothing to do with being an expert. You do not need years of art history training to notice a striking blue and wonder about its story, or to recognise a warm earthy tone and feel the weight of how long humans have been using it. That is exactly the spirit behind our In the Studio series, where we ask Hancock Gallery's artists questions about how they work, including the question:
“Which three colours could you not do without?”
Here is what our artists told us.
Magnus Gjoen keeps it graphic and precise: cyan, magenta and yellow, the building blocks of print colour.
Mark Demsteader works from a classical, earthy set: burnt umber, Prussian blue, cadmium red and cadmium yellow, along with black and white. "That's usually all," he says.
Delphine Lebourgeois goes bold: a neon pink from Lascaux she "wants to use everywhere," paired with black and a dark blue teal.
Matthew Lintott gravitates, without quite meaning to, toward orange in all its forms, "from a burnt, earthy, rusty tone through to a warm sunset," alongside a dirty azure blue, though he admits his recent work has turned fairly monotone.
Al Saralis favours burnt sienna, white and the primary colours.
Sam Wood keeps things simple with black, white and raw umber.
It is a small question with a lot packed into it. Some artists reach for the same primaries that have anchored painting for centuries. Others lean into a single hue, like Matthew Lintott's orange or Delphine Lebourgeois's neon pink, that has become almost a signature. Either way, every answer is a window into how that artist actually sees and builds a piece of work.
The tradition continues
The instinct that made medieval painters treasure ultramarine, or made prehistoric humans reach for ochre on a cave wall, has not gone anywhere. It shows up every time a contemporary artist settles on the handful of colours they return to again and again. Whether it is Mark Demsteader's disciplined earth palette or Magnus Gjoen's clean primaries, the artists at our Newcastle contemporary art gallery are part of the same long tradition of painters thinking carefully, sometimes obsessively, about colour.
Explore the artists carrying this colour tradition forward
Header Photo by The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Unsplash
