© Michael Price Inc.
| 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. |
| "Constanze", one of the artist's models. |
| Some light relief in the early evening painting "The Delicate Arch" in southern Utah! |
| 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 |
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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.
| 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." |
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| 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. |