Why I Care About Lightfastness

Lightfastness–a paint’s ability to resist fading or colour changes, even in bright sunlight–is important to me. When putting together my palettes, I make an effort to make sure every paint has this property. And yes, I do my own lightfastness tests.

Before I explain why, let me step back and say that my opinion is just that, my opinion. Other people’s takes are equally valid. (Unless, of course, they are selling their work, and failing to mention that it will fade quickly. That’s the sort of thing that gives the medium a bad name.)

So why am I posting this subjective opinion? Well, partly to start a dramatic, attention-grabbing fight with Logan, who describes a different take. And partly because I feel misunderstood.

I have read that caring about lightfastness is a bit pretentious, a sign of taking oneself and one’s work far too seriously. But I feel like it is exactly the opposite! I do not imagine my work hanging in museums; I do not even plan to sell it. I just want to be able to give my paintings to people without feeling compelled to give them a list of instructions about how to preserve them (how to frame them, where to hang them, how often to shove them in a dark drawer, etc) like I am asking them to take care of a difficult pet. I think THAT is the sort of behaviour that would come across as taking my works way too seriously.

As it stands, the people I give paintings treat them with about the same care they would offer a postcard, and how can I blame them? They are not experts in art preservation. And even if they were, very few of them would be able to keep my work “under museum conditions”.

One frequently-suggested approach is to buy all the paints, and use them freely in sketchbooks and on practice pieces–but to be more careful when making a more important painting, one that might actually hang somewhere. This doesn’t work for me for two reasons:

• Keeping track of which of my commonly-used paints might fade seems like a pain. It seems easier to think about it once, and set up lightfast palettes.
• More importantly, this is not really how I work. I don’t plan to produce meaningful paintings, I just paint whatever I like, and sometimes something seems meaningful enough to share. Because it features someone, or reflects a shared experience–or just because someone was chatting with me while I painted it, and liked it. I am completely fine with ripping out a sketchbook page for this reason.

This might be a good moment to define what I consider lightfast enough. Basically, if a swatch of a dilute paint I place in a well-lit window is still clearly recognizable as the same colour a year or two later, that paint is good enough for me.
Unfortunately, this excludes not just historical paints like aureolin, alizarin crimson, and rose madder, but also Opera, Prussian Blue, most PR176 ot PR177, some PV37 or PY83 or PY3, and many other pigments I do not even own…

To conclude: I use lightfast pigments because I want to treat my paintings lightly, and because I want them to last as long as my friendships, even in bright sunlight.