© Michael Price Inc.
Michael Price giving a weekend workshop in his New York studio
The artist preparing pigment from rocks and
crystals. The
pigments such as the powerful red of
cinnabar, yellow of orpiment, green of malachite
and blues such as lapis lazuli and azurite.
A weekend workshop for artists interested in learning about the
preparation and application of natural and mineral pigments.
Groups are limited to a maximum of five persons.
Nude
"Constanze", one of the artist's models.
Michael Price at work painting the Delicate Arch
Some light relief in the early evening painting "The Delicate Arch" in southern Utah!
Michael Price, the artist at work
Work in Progress: the beginning of a large relief painting,
"A Part of Eternity No.43, Twenty-five Centuries of War".
Below the completed painting.
Angel Heasook et Monsieur in the desert's afternoon sun painting "The Needles"
The artist with his niece Nadia at the temples of
Un-joo-sa, South Korea 2005
.
A Korean Quartet
Left to right: Blue Bamboo; The Guardian of Kyung-Bok-Goong;
Venus of Un-joo-saa; Green Tea
A Part of Eternity No. 44, Oh! How Deep the Grave.
The artist and his wife, pianist, Heasook Rhee
"Central Park Venus" exhibited in Englewood, NJ in 2005.
Relief in progress
A Part of Eternity No 43, Twenty-five Centuries of War
From a P.B.S. TV documentary broastcast, Houston 2002:

      "Welcome to the world of British artist Michael Price, the first modern man to rediscover the technique of
pigment preparation of the Renaissance masters.... Since the transition from the use of natural pigments to
modern-day synthetic pigments, many of the studio secrets of the Renaissance were lost. Then Michael Price, after
seven years of painstaking research rediscovered what was done 500 years ago.

      First, he found the difference between synthetic pigments and mineral pigments is the pigment particle size.
The synthetics are incredibly fine powder whereas the mineral pigments are fine sand. He began to separate the
different particle sizes of the mineral pigment azurite into different hues of blue from a deep rich blue to a pale sky
blue just like the masters of the Renaissance. Eventually, he began doing this with other minerals such as realgar,
malachite, cinnabar and lapis lazuli.

      Today, Michael Price is absorbed by the language of Renaissance colour and the intensity of natural
pigments...a rewarding discovery."
The Figurative Art of Michael Price
About the Artist:  Michael Price in his New York loft
A PART OF ETERNITY
In his diary, Leonardo da Vinci wrote that
the true experience of the artist is at times
so terrifying that it is the duty of the artist
to cloak his experience in the garb of love
and perfection. The most common images of
twentieth and twenty-first century art,
however, whether painted or photographic,
are not only full of uncertainty and anxiety,
but celebrate a condition of raw aggression.
Without the ingredient of human darkness,
although this cannot be ignored, art has
become almost unmarketable. Modern
media banquets in the throws of this
profitable misery and the artist as a mirror
of society has become enmeshed in this
vicious circle. Without the cutting edge of
the barbaric, together with the celebration
of the shadow side of humanity, much art
faces being discredited as naive whether
abstract or with reference to the
phenomenal world.

Bertrand Russell in his History of Western
Philosophy talks about the conflict between
civilized and barbaric behaviour as a tension
that runs throughout history. The distinction
between the civilized man and the savage is
that of forethought or prudence. Civilization
may check the barbaric through laws but our
present situation shows that barbarism
accompanies us at each stage of the
development of civilization. In ancient
Greece, Russell states, "The worshipper of
Dionysus reacts against prudence. In
intoxication, physical or spiritual, he
recovers an intensity of feeling which
prudence had destroyed; he finds the world
full of delight and beauty, and his
imagination is suddenly liberated from the
prison of everyday preoccupations". He
continues, "In the sphere of thought, sober
civilization is roughly synonymous with
science. But science, unadulterated, is not
satisfying; men need also passion and art and
religion".

For centuries, the common ground shared by
art and the religious instinct has been passion
and imagination, that intensity of feeling and
quality of mind which elevates man beyond
the existential. The soul through the
corporeal and temporal extension of body
and mind has the possibility of experiencing
the most powerful and personal gifts of life,
from perception via the senses to the
imaginative with its psychic insights. If an
artist has any responsibility to humanity, it is
perhaps to reveal this essential core of the
human drama presented - as Leonardo put it
- with love and perfection. The Greeks of
antiquity used the inner visions they had of
their gods as a model for the human drama
which still moves us over two thousand
years later. In comparison, the common
denominator underlying the vision of the
majority of people at the beginning of the
twenty-first century is restricted to the
fulfillment of personal needs.

The twenty-first century continues to
witnessthe continued estrangement of body
and soul whereby the soul is in danger of
becoming a quantifiable concept that enters
or leaves the body according to various
systems of religious belief. The unfortunate
result is that life becomes synonymous with
the fallen state per se. Neither the rise of
religious fundamentalism with its
accompanying barbarism nor new age cults
are redressing the balance. Most religions
continue to glorify the pure soul state
whereas the body has remained a sinful
embarrassment. The question now is
whether religion and art can find a
meaningful language to recover the passion
of the soul's incarnation into a part of
eternity which we experience as the realm
of human concerns.
The Discovery of Protocols for the Use of Natural Pigments in Oil Painting
James Beck, professor in Art History at Columbia University writes:

      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 oils according to propriety
recipes. Time - and, from my vantage point as an art historian, carelessness - caused the Western culture to
irretrievably lose the methods of making natural pigments. 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.