Michael Price, Paintings with Natural Mineral Pigments.

My Narrative

Recently, in June 2026, I returned to the Louvre to see the paintings of Nicolas Poussin once again, a reminder of where my artistic inspiration first began in 1974. After graduating from the London Central School of Art (now Central Saint Martins), I spent that summer making drawings from Poussin paintings in the London National Gallery. In 1976, I spent a year in the Netherlands, drawing from the works of Vermeer and Rembrandt.

By 1977, I had arrived in Munich. Although I had not planned to stay, the city became my home for the next twenty-two years. Life as a young artist often takes unexpected turns. Within a year, I had found a studio in a spacious, inexpensive apartment just blocks from where Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky had once lived in the Schwabing district. There, I was finally able to move beyond drawing from the life model and studying art history to explore my own imagination. Since then, I have remained committed to figurative painting.

In 1981, I was invited to participate in a summer exhibition at Munich’s ‘Haus der Kunst’, where I exhibited my first ‘Apollo and Daphne’ painting. The exhibition led to my first solo exhibition at a well-established gallery, which was an unexpected success and was followed by solo exhibitions in Frankfurt, Erlangen, Cologne, and later France. During the late 1980s, a conservation scientist at the Doerner Institute, the internationally renowned conservation institute in Munich, took great interest in my geometric analysis of a compositional drawing by Poussin, published in my Cologne exhibition catalogue, and invited me to examine the Institute’s recently restored painting by Tintoretto. X-ray and infrared analysis revealed compass holes and construction marks used to position life-size figures within the composition. Looking through the microscope, I saw the natural mineral pigments Tintoretto had used and their extraordinary beauty and brilliance, the very colours I had been searching for over so many years.

By 1990, captivated by the beauty of these natural mineral pigments, I committed myself to painting exclusively with them. Many years of experimentation and trial and error followed as I sought to rediscover the painting methods of the Renaissance masters, knowledge that had been lost over the centuries. Eventually, by 2008, I had not only reconstructed these techniques, but had also solved some of the most complex problems associated with the discoloration of some mineral pigments in oil binders. In 2017, Kremer Pigmente AG, Europe’s leading producer of natural pigments, published my book, ”Renaissance Mysteries, documenting both the preparation of pigments from rocks and crystals and the underlying geometric principles found in many Renaissance paintings.

Fate brought me to New York in 1999, where my work has since been exhibited in galleries in Chelsea, the Upper East Side, and Houston. Art schools and universities in New York City, Munich, Dresden, Korea, and China have invited me to give lectures and to host studio visits, where students observe my techniques for preparing and painting with natural mineral pigments. My works are held in private collections in Vienna, Zurich, Berlin, Munich, Provence, London, Houston, New York, and Seoul. Yet the journey continues, guided by the same curiosity that first led me to Poussin more than fifty years ago, as I seek to unite the natural mineral pigments, geometric principles, and painting methods of the Renaissance with a contemporary vision of figurative painting.