A Totem Pole History: The Work of Lummi Carver Joe Hillaire

8 A Thin Red Line: Pigments and Paint Technology of the Northwest Coast

84 8 A Thin Red Line Pigments and Paint Technology of the Northwest Coast Melonie Ancheta Ever since the earliest human beings created charcoal and red ochre paintings deep in caves, every culture has used color in the forms of pigments, dyes, and paints to bring to life their dreams, their environment, and their experiences. Among Native people of the Northwest Coast, the application of mineral pigments and vegetable dyes to objects and to their own bodies has been one of the most enduring expressions of creativity, spirituality, and identity throughout millennia, and it still is today.1 Prior to trade with Anglo-Europeans, the Indians of the Northwest Coast relied entirely on their environment for pigments and paints from a variety of sources, including colored earths, stones, burnt materials, and organic binders. The first part of this chapter, “Coloring in the Northwest Coast,” examines minerals and methods that Native artists of the Pacific Northwest used ancestrally to make pigments. The second part, “Trade Colors in the Northwest,” is about the paints that became available to carvers beginning in the nineteenth century. The final section, “Paint on Joe Hillaire’s A Thin Red Line 85 Totem Poles,” offers observations on several of Hillaire’s major works, their painting and repainting histories, their color schemes, and Joe’s stylistic uses of color and form. Coloring in the Northwest Coast Colors have universal associations; for example, blue evokes the calming sense of the vast expanse of sky and water, while green gives us a sense of vitality and harmony. At the same time, different cultures imbue colors with particular meanings. In the Northwest, specific culture groups associate deep meanings with particular colors. This is evident in the consistent palettes that have persisted throughout the history of particular cultures. Contemporary northern Northwest Coast and Coast Salish artists are still painting with colors used by their ancestors a thousand years ago. Among the northern tribes—Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian—the palette was and still is narrow, consisting of only three colors: black, red, and blue or green. In the North color schemes are based on a long tradition of design consisting of primary, secondary, tertiary, and negative space. Primary spaces are usually black and occasionally red. Secondary spaces are usually red. Sometimes black and red are reversed as primary and secondary colors. Only in the tertiary spaces are blue or green used. Among the Tlingit, prior to trade with Europeans, blue was apparently most often reserved for shamans and ritual work. The Haida used a pale green in tertiary fields. In the North there are long-standing rules about the design elements and about color use. The Coast Salish have displayed more freedom in their carving style and in their use of color. They have used a wider palette of yellows, blues, greens, black, reds, and white. Yellows, reds, blues, and greens are earth pigments found as clays or stones. These pigments were ground and mixed with the proteins and oils from salmon eggs and a little human saliva, which provides an enzyme to help bind the oils and pigments together. Black pigments were made from a variety of materials, including charred woods, soot, and burnt calciferous materials such as bone. The minerals magnetite and graphite were also used for black. White was made from calcium carbonate (chalk), gypsum, and soft white clay called kaolin, 86 Melonie Ancheta which has been used by Europeans and Chinese for making porcelain and china and is one of the most common minerals in the world. White was also obtained from roasting a particular species of clam shell. Greens were made from the mineral celadonite, which is an iron silicate found all over the world; it is often called green earth. For many years it was believed that greens and blues came from copper compounds, but research done by the Canadian Conservation Institute has qualitatively shown that there is no copper in these pigments, that the beautiful greens we see are celadonite.2 Celadonite has the interesting characteristic of being able to be used with or without a binder like fish egg oil. It can be applied simply with water and is surprisingly durable. I have seen well-used objects painted with celadonite and water that are in excess of four hundred years old, and the paint is still intact. When water is used, the color tends to be powdery and pale but gives a good...