The Colors of Eden
The Colors of Eden
An Interview with Tasha Cathey by Lana Portolano
’aphar – dry earth, dust, powder, ashes, mortar, rubbish
- NAS Old Testament Hebrew Lexicon
When Tasha Cathey walks along forest paths near her home, she often focuses her eyes upon the dust at her feet. On long hikes, or even in the flora of her own backyard, she finds orange ochre, a chunk of hematite red with iron oxide, or sandstone layered with browns and yellows, each formed by the hand of God through an unfathomable journey of natural history. Cathey gathers a few rocks and brings them into her studio, where she will re-create bits of Eden in her slow practice of making paint from earth pigments.
Today, Cathey resides in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband and two-year-old daughter, Lucy. While she has enjoyed providing the creative service of wedding and family portrait photography, since becoming a mother, she has found herself longing for a more contemplative creativity. So, she decided to make the switch from photography to painting.
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Cathey is a kind of nature evangelist. Her sense of wonder is infectious, and she makes me want to get out and experience the rush of gratitude and joy she exudes. “It’s magical,” she says, “knowing that I can go and pull—right from the ground—these colors and pigments. It’s just sitting right there: the Lord’s given it to us. It’s mind-blowing how accessible it can be.”
The slow, analog process of creating pigments and painting—as opposed to the digital form of her photography—wasn’t entirely new to her. Cathey had wanted to study art after high school. Now, with time on her hands throughout the pandemic, she dove in and tried her hand at different methods of painting that caught her eye. “Honestly,” she admits, “I hated it for about six months.”
She found that, to enjoy herself, she had to return to “just having fun” with paint and other natural materials. For about a year, she simply played with colors without any thought of a finished product. Through her creative meandering, she soon discovered the art of creating earth pigments.
“It was a whole rabbit hole of new things to explore,” she said, her voice quickening with excitement. “I remember finding this woman named Heidi Gustafson. She lives in Washington State and posts a lot on Instagram. She studies ochres and pigments—that’s her expertise. She mostly goes out to forage pigments rather than doing much painting, but others I’ve seen are using earth pigments for painting.”
“At first,” she recalls, “I was completely confused. We’re so used to going to the store to buy paints in tubes, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It was just completely fascinating to discover this original way of making paint, and I wanted to learn more. Now I’ve been immersed in this world for about two years.”
On Instagram, Cathey documents the narrative of discovering earth pigments from the ground up: first, her walks in nature, then finding rocks and delighting in their unique colors and textures, and finally bringing some home. As a nature journaler and dye-plant forager myself, I came to our conversation with a shared desire to invite nature in, as co-creator in my artistic process. Hearing Cathey talk about how her work with pigments resonated in her prayer life made me eager to try earth pigments myself.
When Cathey speaks about her process, she overflows with praise for each step. “It’s the magic of starting to look at the ground, getting your hands dirty. I was already the person who stopped to take pictures, but now I started noticing the colors of the earth around me, picking up rocks, scratching them to see what pigment they left under my fingernail. Honestly, it’s the wonder. It’s the awe of just admiring the Lord as creator as I enter into this world of discovery. I’d never stopped to think, this is where we got color. God made color.”
Sometimes Cathey doesn’t even know what she is seeing. She brings field guides to study geology as she gathers specimens, but there’s also a sense of needing to be careful. “I tell myself I need to be a good steward,” she explains, “In the language I use to describe it to others, I’m always trying to convey that there’s a sacredness to making paint this way—that the Lord created this, and we should not take more than we need. I try not to take any piece bigger than my hand.”
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The next step is back in the studio, where she breaks the stones into small pieces and grinds them into fine powder. “I’ll put the rock into a mortar and pestle and start pounding it, and it’s incredible what happens. It turns into something like powdered sugar and it gets everywhere. It’s mesmerizing because each rock yields different pigments. You’re not going to experience the same reaction or color every time as you would from a tube.”
“Once I grind it up, I pass it through a sieve, so it will take out little twigs or hairs. Then I put it into glass vials and stop them with a cork. If I have larger pieces, I’ll come back to them later, so I have these rock piles lying around. It’s messy and time consuming. Honestly, it takes hours to grind and sift these pigments.”
Finally, she mixes the paints. On a flat piece of glass, she blends the ingredients together with a glass tool called a muller. For oil paint, the recipe calls for a slow-drying oil like linseed or walnut. For watercolor, she uses gum arabic, a tree resin. “I mix this with water, honey, and clove oil, and I mull it all together.” Then she puts the newly made watercolors into pans and lets them dry. She has created paint, each a uniquely colored substance awaiting the alchemy of creation, this time by human hands.
“A lot of the language around working with pigments and the earth conjured up imagery from the Book of Genesis,” Cathey reflects, “of God creating us from the dust of the earth. So much of my fascination is that I found myself starting to ponder the Lord more as I did it, in a way I hadn’t with any other medium. I was using the very material God used to create us, the dust he says we will return to.
“‘Aphar,” Cathey teaches me, “is the Hebrew word for dust in Genesis. It has many meanings: dry or loose earth, ore, mortar, plaster, debris and ashes… a heap of broken rubbish. Overall, it’s been really humbling to think about that as I work. God made me from dust, and I’m making art with the dust God used to make me.”
The process of mulling can take 30 or 45 minutes just to grind and mix one batch. During that time, Cathey loses herself in prayer. “Once my hands are busy, I get completely lost in this creation process and my mind starts wandering. I feel really fulfilled in those times.”
I ask her to reflect a bit more on the physical nature of what she is doing. She resonates with this: “There’s something so interesting about us as humans, how much fulfilment we get out of just moving our bodies. I’m in my head about stuff a lot, but to mix those two worlds of being physical but also intellectual—of being given a spirit, but also a body to use—it makes the whole creative process come full circle for me. One of the hardest things about painting for me is sitting still. The paint making process slows me down and gives me an avenue to experience creating in a way that’s not about the final product.”
I suggest there is a hunger in young people today—in everyone, really—to slow down, because we are hyper-mediated in everything we do, and Cathey concurs. “Yes, there are real limits to how fast we can do things because of the way our hands are formed and the way our body moves. Usually, slowing down feels right. At first, we might worry and think, ‘what’s taking me so long?’ But there’s nothing wrong. You’re in it. You’re in the process of creation. You’re supposed to enjoy it.”
As an analogy, she tells me a story about a time she drove friends through a beautiful national park near her home. “When we were about 30 minutes in her friends said, ‘Well, where is it? Where are the Smokies?’ I turned to them and said, ‘We’ve been in the park for half an hour. Look, we’re here!” Experiencing creation, she says, can be like that. It’s not the instantaneous gratification we get from posting a cell phone picture online.
Cathey’s description makes clear how tantalizingly slow creating something beautiful can be, and it whets my desire to see what she will paint. Making earth pigments has made her more aware of the inheritance of art history from great painters in the Renaissance who ground their own pigments to pre-historic traditions across cultures. When I asked her what kind of art she imagines herself making, she says she finds herself attracted to realism, drawing on her landscape photography as models.
Representation in co-creation with nature—and nature’s Creator—is something I have thought long about, not only as a writer and an artist, but also as a mother. Mothering is another role I share with Cathey, and I’m curious how that might influence the way she thinks of herself as an artist.
She pauses a moment, “I think about those dualities—that I’ve created something good the way God did. When He made us from the dust, He said that we were good. It makes me want to pour my whole life into embodying Christ for her as best I can. And it helps to be aware,” she adds, “Lucy didn’t come from nowhere. There was effort, there was me carrying her for nine months. A lot of labor that goes into being intentional in a world that’s fallen. Considering that, I think it helps to be intentional in creating art, too.
“I try to carry that intentionality into every facet of life, because as people, we create just by existing. It’s easy for us to be critical, tearing down what we don’t like about this world, but making something good is innate to our nature of who we are in the image of God: We have to create. We have to bring the good God has given us into the world.”
Lana Portolano
Author & Professor
Lana writes at the intersection of religion, language and culture. She is the author of Be Opened! The Catholic Church and Deaf Culture (CUA Press, 2020) and her work has appeared in America magazine, U.S. Catholic Historian and several other publications. She is currently working on a collection of Pope Francis' writings on disability and marginalization. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America and is professor emerita of English at Towson University in Maryland.
Find Tasha Cathey’s work here