Fusion, incandescence, and explosion of colors...
An alchemical and volcanic process.
My enamel color pallet...
My very first experiments with the material, to tame it and realize the color pallet at my disposal.
While making it, I remembered that when I was a kid, I liked to hang around in front of the window of a large stationery store in Geneva, to admire the beautiful wooden boxes of Caran d'Ache watercolor colored pencils that made me dream...
I received a magnificent box of 80 pencils when I was 18, which still accompanies me today (and which since then, I believe, has given rise to another vocation, the succession is assured)
And I can still spend hours hanging around the Beaux-Arts stores..
The mineral powders and metallic oxides which give their color to the enamel, before being heated, are not often, if ever, of the final shade obtained after fusion.
Establishing a color chart is essential, it is an usefull tool to see the color of the glass, the opaques, the transparencies, how they look applied directly on the copper which serves as a support or over another color.
This is what allows me to be able to play at "reproducing" a photo of a seabed or an aerial view, or even an abstract painting whose composition appeals to me, or a rusty texture of which i have always like the so special shades.
Even though I can move and put my little plates of the color pallet into perspective, there is still so much magic at work when applying the powders (with a mini-strainer, the precision being somewhat random!) and a lot of feeling since I can't really "see" the result before melting.
Moreover, when heated at more than 900°, the very fine powdery texture very quickly takes on a grainy appearance of powdered sugar, then of orange peel, to arrive at fusion...
A moment of incandescence when the liquid glass becomes a luminescent red lava flow.
And then comes the magic...
As it cools down, the colors appear one by one, to reveal the final rendering, like the image that once slowly appeared in the developer bath of silver photography.
It is an hypnotic moment for each and every piece.
A moment when, holding my breath, I'm watching a whole world appearing under my eyes.
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