Dear Culture Curators:

The method is called Nihonga. It’s a tradition of Japanese painting that uses crushed minerals as pigment. Pulverized by hand to a consistency finer than talc, the minerals are then mixed with water and Japanese hide glue, then spread in layers on paper of the highest quality. Each layer requires several days to dry, and it is not uncommon for a nihonga painting to have nearly 100 layers of pigment as background to the final image desired by the artist. The effect creates an iridescent, almost mini-geode-like quality. At a glance the painting simply looks shiny, but after a longer gaze one sees how the light is almost trapped between the layers, creating a mesmerizing optical depth.