Archive: Burnt Umber

[luna65]

 

 

A rich deep tone the result of which can only be obtained with fire - heating raw umber until it oxidizes - we've created a fragranced interpretation suitable for both men and women to enjoy…the resinous aura of a blend of ambers, nag champa and exotic majmua melded with smoky Arabian wood attars and intriguing earth accords.

 

AMBERS ~ Fertility, creativity, love, luck, riches.
SANDALWOOD, ARABIAN WOOD BOUQUET ~ Love, exotic, sensual atmospheric; aphrodisiac. Healing, spirituality, exorcism.
SMOKE ~ In addition to the attributes of whatever is being burned (resins, woods, etc), smoke is for cleansing, purification, renewal, consecration, concealment and celebration. It is also the foremost mode of communication from this world to the realm of spirits and the gods.
CHAMPA FLOWER ~ Nobility. Psychic enhancer; inspires peace and harmony; fidelity.
EARTH ~ Grounding, centering, protection, renewal, reincarnation, life.

 

Created by: Mara Fox

Description: Julie (luna65)

Label art:

Crayon Collection, March 2014

 

The Love Potion Crayon Collection - add a little COLOR to your life!

Our March 2014 collection comprises an olfactory box of crayons, but there are no added colorings to these perfumes at all - they are scent representations of color. These selections are mood and wardrobe enhancements which give off the "aura" of colors in all their vibrational splendor! Color your world with fragranced pleasure by using our "crayons" to scribble yourself with scent!

 

 

Narrow sinuous streets, buildings standing cheek-to-jowl with no seeming relation, but all have been here, in this city, longer than even the earth can recall. Everything beyond this place, it will not speak of the city. It only murmurs to itself, and to the wide cruel crystal sky.

I sought the Painter, the one who had so skillfully rendered the artwork I studied in my academic obsession…and what better way to nurture obsession than to create a reason for its pursuit? The painting resided in the museum of my childhood voyages, clutching the hand of my father, as he led me along marble floors, past room upon room of paintings: some colorful and chaotic, others subdued and serene, some disturbing, others mysterious.

The painting, a portrait of a young man who stood upon a precipice – in some perverse homage to whomever had first rendered The Fool – he was young and beautiful and yet he gave no outward sign that he was seeking revelation. If anything he seemed to know himself well, and was only moving because to travel is to find oneself within the landscapes, to view the self from different perspectives.

His hair was the most beautiful shade I had ever seen. All my research indicated that the Painter crafted her own pigments from the applicable raw materials, and from there combined them into colors. All her paintings were recognizable by the use of color: everyday objects, people, places, all rendered in tints, shades and tones which seized the viewer with an intangible curiosity, a yearning to know the tableaux behind the representative artistry

I wanted to know him, and to touch his beautiful hair. There was something enigmatic about the not-quite-a-smile he offered to the Painter, he stood with arms crossed, holding himself in, almost defiantly offering his personage for reproduction. He seemed caught by the moment, patiently waiting until he could be freed. A mountain loomed behind him as he faced the void, he knew it was behind him, allowing no chance to recant his decision.

Years of careful study, accumulating all available knowledge and prising more out of family, former associates, lovers, friends and enemies. But none could tell me about the subject of my favorite painting. And I only discovered where she'd fled to because she summoned me herself, a letter arriving one day not much different from the rest, but with its arrival changing everything after.

"It has come to my attention you wish to know about my painting Narrow Path…"

And perhaps more than the beautiful young man who inhabited the painting, that title – what did it mean? Why did it, and not his name, or the name of the place, designate the painting's subjective interpretation?

I had spent years trying to match the color of his hair – artists, chemists, alchemists (real and only purported) - but none could accomplish that shade, nor the way she portrayed how muted daylight brought out a deep burnished gleam, further accentuating his heavy-lidded suspicious hazel eyes.

I called her the Painter because she had once remarked in a rare interview that she believed the word "artist" was disingenuous.

"I paint what I see, I am only a conduit," she said. "The world goes into me and comes out onto the canvas. It is fixed, then, for better or worse."

And so now I stood within cooling plaster walls, while outside the wind muttered dryly and the world stretched away empty beyond this huddled city. She was mixing the color, in the same way which all the others had done: taking burnt umber and adding it with bits of black and white, to linseed oil. The pigment was more reddish than its raw counterpart.

"We are tempered by existence, yes?" she asked, not turning her gaze from the mortar and pestle in her hands. "We are solidified and subject to chemical shifting, re-bonding of the molecules. And yet –"

She held strange beliefs, the Painter did. But she did not speak of them, correctly assuming I was well-acquainted with her philosophy.

"Who is he?" I saw she had created the tone just as it was in the painting.

"He is within me now. Do you want to see?"

She set down the mixing tools and moved through a black curtain hanging in an adjacent doorway. I followed, breathless and sweating.

"So do you think," she began, pulling the curtains on the window in the room, "he has completed the path, or is he just beginning?"

Lining the walls of this room, standing on easels, stacked upon the floor, was the painting, in myriad reproduction. As I took them in, each rendition appeared identical until one looked closely, then some detail would prove the assumption false. And yet he was the same, he did not change, not the essential fact of him.

Nor the burnt umber of his hair, shining forever against a pale sky, a monolithic mountain, giving nothing of himself but his presence at that point in time.

"Do you know?" I whispered. It sounded like the wind, and the wind sounded like it was laughing.

"No," she answered, and her voice was softer than mine, as if she were afraid to speak in his painted presence. "As many times as I paint him, I cannot decide."

Our obsessions viewed one another just then, from within the disguises of our eyes.