Capetown Pigments

A guesthouskeeper from Scarborough, south of Cape Town, became aware of Deborah Kressebuch's work and invited her to stay and paint pictures for his guesthouse. The topic was free, she was inspired by the imposing nature around the Cape of Good Hope and worked on site mainly with the sketchbook and her camera - and collected colored stones.

On her forays through the area, she soaked up all the colors - the rough landscape with its ice-cold sea lived from these extremely luminous moments, from the deep turquoise of the waves to the bright yellow ocher cliffs, the bright green of the flora and the dark red earth at the roadside.

From her first attempts to work with pigments in the 'Mountainpearls' series, the artist and sculptor Christian Aubry led her to her very own pigment production process.

The landscape then loudly invited her to collect his colors!

With the collection of the stones, the fascination with the countless color nuances grew - the colors themselves an inspiration in themselves, which suddenly appeared on every street corner - the journey had to be constantly interrupted to collect the brightly colored lumps, which ultimately led to the first own color palette.

Back in Switzerland, the artist ground the stones into pigments, a slow and very laborious process using a hammer, mortar and grinding stone. The stone powder had to be as fine as possible so that its color effect could be expressed in the painting.

Deborah Kressebuch implemented this first experience in the series of works Wild Coast, but the discovery of the passion for colored stones and the own color obtained from them only began in winter 2018 and patiently waited for a moment with a lot of time and peace for the continuation.