Peter Layne Arguimbau smears a dab of iron oxide on a strip of wood with a palette knife.
“Look at it,” he says. “It’s a beautiful tonal sepia soup.” He mixes in a bit of powdered light-blue pigment and meshes the two substances together with his fingers. Suddenly, as if he were an alchemist, he achieves a fierce blue color with tremendous depth. He picks up one of his paintings, of a young woman with luxurious dark, wavy hair that seems to glisten in the light. “This is the same blue,” he says, pointing to the center of a mass of hair. It looks black to me.
A nationally recognized artist of marine paintings, Arguimbau is so much more than the simple biography of him that has appeared in numerous publications and gallery press releases over the years. His seascapes of yachts are much prized by collectors, but less known is his other work: woodlands, still life, portraiture, animals and religious subjects. All of his oil paintings glisten with luminosity and translucence. He is also a consummate artist, from mixing pigments with oxides in the manner of the Flemish masters to painting his seascapes from the cockpit of his catboat, the Molly Rose. He creates iron, zinc, sulfate and magnesium oxides to meld with only a handful of powdered pigments to achieve incredible nuances of color. This is only part of his story.
Source: Connecticut Post
