The colours of Oman

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In my opinion, an artistic exploration of Oman first and foremost required an examination of the colours of Oman and an attempt to develop a colour system of my own from the existing geological wealth, which I could then work with in practice.

Invited by Juma Al-Maskari, I visited the Sultanate of Oman for the first time in February 1992. When I arrived in Oman, I was confronted with the question "What do you know about the geology of Oman?" by Juma's brother, the PDO geologist Salim Al-Maskari. In his opinion, you can only understand and experience Oman if you know its geology.
I quickly realised that his assertion was correct. The colours and therefore the atmosphere of the landscape were characterised by very bright and at the same time intensely coloured tones that had nothing to do with the earth pigments I had brought with me from Europe.

In the following two weeks, we travelled over 4000 kilometres off-road in search of different colour values and collected 23 different stones, clays and sands.
The first step of our work was done, now the minerals had to be pulverised. Of course, we didn't have any professional, mechanical equipment for this, we used a simple household appliance, a brass grinder. After a week, all the minerals had been processed into pigment powder. We decided to use practical examples to illustrate the suitability of Omani earth pigments for artistic purposes.
In order to learn as much as possible about the pigments and their respective possibilities, we carried out tests with different binders, the oil content of which varied. When Omani pigments are mixed with water and an acrylic binder, they become much darker. When the paint dries, however, the light, original colour returns. The painter must therefore be able to imagine the colour he is applying to the painting as dried.
Binders with a higher oil content behave completely differently. It is easier to work with oil paints than with acrylic paints, as oil paints have the same colour intensity both when wet and when dry. Oil paints retain the character of the wet pigment even when dry, but in the case of Omani paints this unfortunately has nothing to do with the bright and colour-intensive character of the dry pigment.
The tests made it clear that only the water-based binders were able to capture and reproduce the light of Oman. However, the oil colours gave the impression of a radical climate change: they made the landscapes of Oman appear dull, dull, dark and damp.

The results of the experiments appeared in 1993 in an article in the PDO News in Oman.

The Omani colour system thus obtained served as the colour coding system for this website, for the corporate design of the project "Religious tolerance - Islam in the Sultanate of Oman".

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