Transparent Painting: Ultramarine Blue

In the early 1970s Marcia Hafif bought pigments of every colour to make her own paint, grinding the pigment with a muller and mixing it with linseed oil. Hafif has stated she wanted to "let a colour … express itself, reveal its multiple nuances," exploring how each colour reacted to different treatments. In this work, ultramarine is both material and subject matter, medium and process. Applied methodically yet with vivid brushstrokes, the blue alternates between transparency and opacity and shows the ways in which Hafif understood painting as an inherently physical and material process.