When I paint, I build up several materials in layers. One of them is iwa-enogu, the mineral pigments used in Nihonga, Japanese-style painting.
My grandmother painted in the Nihonga style, and one of her paintings still hangs in the Japanese-style room of my home. Iwa-enogu is a slightly special material for me.
Powdered stone becomes color as it is
Natural iwa-enogu is powder made by crushing minerals. Instead of mixing in colorants, it uses the color of the stone itself.
There are about 40 kinds of ore used as raw material. They are crushed and sorted into about 10 grades by particle size, and it is said this makes around 400 to 500 colors in all.
The blue gunjo comes from azurite, the green rokusho from malachite, and the reddish bengara from iron oxide. The names of the colors are tied directly to the names of the stones.
Dissolved in nikawa and fixed to paper
As a powder, iwa-enogu will not stay on paper. It is dissolved in an adhesive called nikawa, an age-old glue made by boiling down animal hides and bones.
How thick the nikawa is, how much is used, and the humidity and temperature of the day all change how the paint spreads and dries. Even the same color shows a slightly different face from day to day.
Particle size turns one color into another
The coarser the particles, the darker and deeper the color settles; the finer they are, the paler and brighter it becomes. Even colors taken from the same ore look completely different when their number (particle size) differs.
So in Nihonga, there are moments closer to "choosing and layering" colors than "mixing" them.
Shin-iwa-enogu and suihi-enogu
Natural minerals are limited in supply, and some are expensive. Shin-iwa-enogu, new mineral pigments, fill that gap. They are made by mixing metal oxides into colored glass (frit) and firing it at 700 to 1,000 degrees. Their quality is stable, they come in many colors, and they came into wide use from around 1952.
Another kind, suihi-enogu, is made by adding dyes to earth or to gofun, a white pigment made from seashells, and is often used for undercoats and large areas.
Using the same colors as 1,300 years ago
It is known that the murals of the Takamatsuzuka Tumulus in Nara Prefecture used a pigment with the same composition as today's rokusho. That means I can dissolve and use, with my own hands, colors that people used more than 1,300 years ago.
To be honest, iwa-enogu is a time-consuming material. Dissolving it takes time, and some days it does not go as I want.
Even so, the time spent dissolving stone becomes part of painting itself. The quiet while my hands are moving has become, for me, time I need in order to live.
In Mermaid nao's commissioned art, I sometimes use these Nihonga materials, layered with other media.
Sources
Kyoto University of the Arts, Distance Learning blog (Nihonga course, materials 1: iwa-enogu made by crushing natural minerals)
Nakagawa Gofun Enogu Co., Ltd. (On the granularity of iwa-enogu / Starting Nihonga)
Wikipedia (Iwa-enogu)
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