Word: pigment
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...them to swell. The pain and redness, which appear a few hours after exposure, are caused by the dilation of blood vessels in the damaged area. The ensuing tan is the body's desperate effort to save its skin from further injury. Tiny granules of melanin, a brownish pigment made in specialized skin cells, rise to the surface in response to UV radiation and act as sunlight deflectors. Over the years, however, the beachgoer pays for this glamorous natural shield. The buildup of melanin, combined with UV damage to the elastic fibers in underlying layers, gives the skin...
...years he was piling it on with a palette knife in higher and higher tones, all the way up to pure flake white, in an effort to render the broken luminosity he saw in nature. There are moments when one feels the subject needs disinterring from the mass of pigment, but the expressive gains were sometimes enormous...
Marjorie B. Cohn, who works as a conservator of works on paper; explains that many of these pigments have not been produced for hundreds of years. One of these is what Cohn calls the "Mummy" Pigment--a murky brown color that 19th century English painters produced by grinding up the bones and wrapplings of Egyptian mummies...
Another rare pigment is a brilliant yellow derived from the urine of Indian cows fed large quantities of mango leaves When they realized that the mango leaf diet was killing the cows, the British-- in a move typical of imperial altruism--banned the production of "Indian Yellow." The big chunk of it in the Center's collection is one of the only surviving samples...
...Islamic decoration; the source is not simply quoted but transformed. The miniaturist's precision of edge and line is replaced by a fuzzy, affable kind of formal system-nursery-toy versions, almost, of the sphere, cube and cylinder, those intimidating Platonic solids of programmatic modernism. His pigment, however, has an extraordinary range of effect. His work sports in the transparency, density and sweet pastiness that only oil paint can give. Surfeited by color, twinkling with fields of dots (like enlarged details of a Seurat, betokening light), its casual surface can look clumsy; but that is only Hodgkin playing with...