Michael Price, painting with natural & mineral pigments

“The archetypal world inside ourselves is just as real – or imaginary – as the physical world we inhabit.”
With Renaissance Art as his ‘guiding star,’ American Michael Price has been a professional painter since the 1980s. Making his own pigments from minerals, rocks and crystals just like his artistic ancestors centuries before, Price creates rich, engrossing paintings that explore the experience of the archetypal world we all house inside of us.

“I work with natural and mineral pigments made from rocks and crystals as well as natural dyes. I have published the protocols on the preparation of azurite and lapis lazuli. These historical pigments were in use until the late eighteenth century and were replaced by modern synthetic colours during the industrial revolution.”

The late James Beck, professor of art history at Columbia University in New York wrote that Michael Price has restored and preserved for Western culture our Renaissance tradition, that depended on artists and their assistants grinding the semiprecious stones and mixing them with a variety of binding mediums according to propriety recipes. Time – and, from my vantage point as an art historian, industrialization – caused the Western culture to irretrievably lose the methods of making natural pigments.

British born American artist Michael Price has single-handedly mitigated that historic loss.

His rediscovery of the lost historic methods for preparing mineral pigments reopens and represents this medium for artists across the world. As a teacher and professor of Art History to today’s young artists, I am absolutely convinced that Michael’s painting and speaking presence in the United States will signify a reawakening of that tradition.
Michael Price
Sep 17, 2020