AKA Viridian
Viridian (also hydrated chromium oxide green) is a blueish green pigment that has many names: Verte Emeraude, Veronese Green, Permanentgrün to name a few.
For each color study I get to choose one of the many names that a pigment has been called over time. Usually I will pick the most common name, but in this case naming is somewhat ambiguous so I stuck with the name that I saw when I first learned of it: Viridian.
“The name viridian, derived from the Latin name viridi(s), meaning green, was apparently first applied to the pigment in England in the 1860s (Maerz & Paul, 1950).“ 1
Viridian (39x37/PG18) APII, 2021
Oil and ink on heavy cotton rag paper
Edition of 10 + 2-4 AP
50 x 40 cm
This color is a beautiful semi transparent green, vibrant and somewhat unnatural in appearance. Due to it’s transparency, getting a flat even shade is very difficult, which is why the work you see here (one of the first artist proofs I painted from this series) has some uneven patches.
The following two are some of my earliest oil paintings from the 2017 Moods series, where I used Viridian to create both an opaque and a transparent shade of color.
Night Slant (Alternate I of III), 2017
Oil on c-type print mounted on Dibond, in artist's aluminium frame
24 x 30,5 cm
Green Cue, 2017
Oil on c-type print mounted on Dibond, in artist's aluminium frame
24 x 30,5 cm
1 - Elisabeth West FitzHugh. Artists ́ Pigments A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics VOLUME 3 (Archetype Publications, London, 1997)