letting the fur
fly where it may. In the case of Mr. Krehbeil, he had gone to meet his Maker, so his patriarchal stance was no longer in play. Mrs. Krehbeil was ill, which could mean anything from abdication of power with the onset of dependency to a total logjam, if the offspring were still clinging to her emotionally. There were four grown children; an abdication would leave them to duke out who got control of the situation. Deirdre was not returning Jenny’s phone calls. The older son had left to make his fortune decades ago; Deirdre had once told her that. The younger daughter had not shown her face around the county in years, a total flake according to Deirdre.
That left the second brother. His name was Hector. She’d heard stories about him that suggested that he would be of no help. What the hell, I’ll give him a try, Jennifer decided, as she once again picked up her telephone and dialed.
9
I SPENT THE NEXT TWO HOURS UP AT THE U, DIGGING THROUGH the library for reference texts on paint pigments, so that when I telephoned Noreen Babcock I wouldn’t sound like a total rube.
My search was not in vain. I found a three-volume set of books published jointly by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Oxford University Press: Artists’ Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics . These books were filled with highly detailed information. Each chapter presented a different pigment, documenting its characteristics with laboratory analyses such as mass spectrography, chromatography, spectral absorption curves, X-ray diffraction patterns, photomicrographs, scanning electron micrographs, and a host of other analytical methods. I felt simultaneously cowed by the depth of information and heartened that there might be some meat on the bone of the idea of making a thesis project out of examining Gray Eyes’s painting. Foolish me, I thought all I would need to do was fill in the gap between what the authors of the articles knew about the general topic and what I needed to know in particular about Gray Eyes’s painting, write it up, and run it by Molly Chang for approval.
At lunchtime, I checked the volumes out of the library and took them home to Faye’s house, where I set myself up with a comfy overstuffed chair and ottoman, a PB&J, a cup of tea, and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. In fact I wolfed down the sandwich on the way between the kitchen and the chair, but I do mean to suggest that I was trying to feed myself a balanced diet. Stuffing the first cookie into my mouth, I picked up Volume 2 and opened it at random. I had gone through volume 1 at the
library. I found myself in chapter two of Ultramarine Blue, Natural and Artificial , by Joyce Plesters.
I am not a strong reader. Reading is a linear sequential activity, and I have a time-space random kind of mind, built for visualizing problems in 3- and 4-D. So naturally I turned first to the illustrations. Figure I was captioned, “Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. Cut and polished specimen. White veins of crystalline impurities and gold-colored flecks of pyrites are visible.”
Cool, I thought. Ultramarine-blue pigment was once ground from lapis lazuli. It’s a semiprecious stone, so that must have been expensive!
I went to my room and pulled my copy of Dana’s Manual of Mineralogy off of the bookshelf in search of details on lapis lazuli. Dana’s advised me that the part of the stone that was used as pigment was in fact a mineral called lazurite, which is the blue part of lapis lazuli, and that the white streaks were calcite, which, together with the pyrite and pyroxene and other silicate minerals, made up the marbled appearance. The painter would try to remove the calcite and pyrite from the lazurite, I supposed. But trace impurities would persist in the pigment, and the stone would vary with its source, perhaps making it possible to identify its source. This is going to be great!
Figure two, on the next page, was a detail from
fly where it may. In the case of Mr. Krehbeil, he had gone to meet his Maker, so his patriarchal stance was no longer in play. Mrs. Krehbeil was ill, which could mean anything from abdication of power with the onset of dependency to a total logjam, if the offspring were still clinging to her emotionally. There were four grown children; an abdication would leave them to duke out who got control of the situation. Deirdre was not returning Jenny’s phone calls. The older son had left to make his fortune decades ago; Deirdre had once told her that. The younger daughter had not shown her face around the county in years, a total flake according to Deirdre.
That left the second brother. His name was Hector. She’d heard stories about him that suggested that he would be of no help. What the hell, I’ll give him a try, Jennifer decided, as she once again picked up her telephone and dialed.
9
I SPENT THE NEXT TWO HOURS UP AT THE U, DIGGING THROUGH the library for reference texts on paint pigments, so that when I telephoned Noreen Babcock I wouldn’t sound like a total rube.
My search was not in vain. I found a three-volume set of books published jointly by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Oxford University Press: Artists’ Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics . These books were filled with highly detailed information. Each chapter presented a different pigment, documenting its characteristics with laboratory analyses such as mass spectrography, chromatography, spectral absorption curves, X-ray diffraction patterns, photomicrographs, scanning electron micrographs, and a host of other analytical methods. I felt simultaneously cowed by the depth of information and heartened that there might be some meat on the bone of the idea of making a thesis project out of examining Gray Eyes’s painting. Foolish me, I thought all I would need to do was fill in the gap between what the authors of the articles knew about the general topic and what I needed to know in particular about Gray Eyes’s painting, write it up, and run it by Molly Chang for approval.
At lunchtime, I checked the volumes out of the library and took them home to Faye’s house, where I set myself up with a comfy overstuffed chair and ottoman, a PB&J, a cup of tea, and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. In fact I wolfed down the sandwich on the way between the kitchen and the chair, but I do mean to suggest that I was trying to feed myself a balanced diet. Stuffing the first cookie into my mouth, I picked up Volume 2 and opened it at random. I had gone through volume 1 at the
library. I found myself in chapter two of Ultramarine Blue, Natural and Artificial , by Joyce Plesters.
I am not a strong reader. Reading is a linear sequential activity, and I have a time-space random kind of mind, built for visualizing problems in 3- and 4-D. So naturally I turned first to the illustrations. Figure I was captioned, “Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. Cut and polished specimen. White veins of crystalline impurities and gold-colored flecks of pyrites are visible.”
Cool, I thought. Ultramarine-blue pigment was once ground from lapis lazuli. It’s a semiprecious stone, so that must have been expensive!
I went to my room and pulled my copy of Dana’s Manual of Mineralogy off of the bookshelf in search of details on lapis lazuli. Dana’s advised me that the part of the stone that was used as pigment was in fact a mineral called lazurite, which is the blue part of lapis lazuli, and that the white streaks were calcite, which, together with the pyrite and pyroxene and other silicate minerals, made up the marbled appearance. The painter would try to remove the calcite and pyrite from the lazurite, I supposed. But trace impurities would persist in the pigment, and the stone would vary with its source, perhaps making it possible to identify its source. This is going to be great!
Figure two, on the next page, was a detail from
Similar Books
