Artist who creates her own pigments from scratch highlighted in California exhibit

An upcoming exhibition in California spotlights landscape artist and self-described “rock hound” Su Yu-Xin, who makes her own pigments from minerals she mines herself.

Su calculated that most painters patronized only five high-end brands, which she likened to finding out that “all the top chefs in the world shop from the same grocery store.”

That epiphany sent her across the Pacific Rim in search of stones, minerals, and shells to bring back to her “part studio, part science lab” in Los Angeles, where she’s created around 200 distinctive pigments.

From Taiwan’s beaches to Mount St. Helens, Su’s works illuminate the “long interplay of trade and culture around the Pacific” via “the geopolitics of color,” The Guardian wrote.