I first encountered casein paint on a hike in Austria, along the border to Czechoslovakia. It was during the Wall, and we had come down by train from Berlin, where I was teaching English at the University, for a bit of exercise, Nature and good beer.  

We came across a farmer who was repairing and decorating old cabinets and chests in his barn.  He painted with oil. In fact, all the examples we saw were in oil. The vignettes were surrounded by blue and red combed rays, which would have been difficult in casein, as I later learned.

Because of outrageous customs at the German-Austrian border, I couldn’t take a painted piece home with me to Berlin on the train. Because of the Wall, the cupboard could transverse Czechoslovakia to East Germany, but I could not accompany it.  I settled on filling my backpack with books and pamphlets on how to paint Austrian folk style. How hard could it be? 😊

The oldest pieces were done in casein, but they were all in the Neues Museum in Bad Toelz in Switzerland. The matter rested.

The backpack was again useful when I left Berlin and flew to Whitehorse to look for gold. I had given up my Mercedes 190SL with the hard and soft tops, the apartment in Fridenau, and the job at the Free University. Eventually, I found a display of casein paint about 6 feet wide at the University Book Store in Seattle.  Folk furniture was available on Whidbey Island, as homes were remodeled and the old-growth cabinetry removed.  The going price was $20 for a cabinet, but most needed repair.  It was all the style then to strip wooden furniture and too bad if the wood was not original or intact.

Casein paint had pretty much gone out of favor by that time. No one was using it to add details in valuable pigments to the fresco walls of their Roman villas. The Indian School in Santa Fe was no longer teaching students to illustrate Southwest native motifs in casein. Enough theater backdrops had fouled with bacteria, that acrylic paint was firmly established. Posters were still being done in casein. But the paint does not lend itself much to shading. It dries far too quickly and clumps up if stroked too many times. Worse yet, it can lift off to the ground and refuse to go back down. (That happened to me later with a cabinet. One of the red grapes was greenish-white in the end.)

The artist casein available in tubes was an emulsion mixture patented by Ramon Shiva that dried not so quickly but also not so waterproof. Because casein is brittle when dry, it requires a firm substrate—wood or boards. Canvas was an option only for the thinnest application. And then, why not work in classical watercolor?

What had made casein paint popular for stage sets, and also for home decoration, in the early 20th century, was how brilliant the colors remain even when thinned.  The best old cabinets in my books took advantage of exactly that quality. Natural wood was reserved where possible, then a white probably shellac gesso ground was applied on the chosen areas and decorated. The colors glowed.

Cabinets and hope chests were carried by cart through the lanes of the village from the bride’s house to the groom’s.  Motifs were often pears and grapes—sure signs of plenty. If there were landscapes depicted, they might well have been the village gate and church tower. The couple’s names and the year might be accompanied by chosen wise words. Obviously, a folk painter would need to know calligraphy and sign painting.

And so I settled north of Seattle, among the dairy farms of Whidbey Island, and painted old cupboards as well as cheese boxes brought in from Dufeck Manufacturing in Denmark, Wisconsin. It was my hope that this ancient paint would yield a new style. A local antique store had stunning examples of Kutani and Arita wares, cloisonné vases, Delft. I painted Northwest Coast, ship pipe style based on Argillite carving. Later, I studied Southwest pre-historic pottery and Pre-Columbian art.  I am grateful to the art dealers who employed me and especially to photographer Robin Stancliff.

Fate and chance brought me back to Whidbey Island some years later. I had access to Amish furniture from the Midwest, but Mexican and Indian painted pieces had flooded the market. I applied a ground of white-pigmented shellac to a flat piece of Masonite and entered the big market.  Soon water textures began to appear that I had never seen before as the milk proteins grabbed the pigments and ran with them. It was an exciting time.

By then, casein paint was no longer on the shelves of art stores.  The Shiva company had sold out. Finally, Richeson Art in Kimberley, Wisconsin began manufacturing the artist colors.  They have proprietary blues. Any pigment that does not tolerate alkali will decompose in casein medium. Regardless of additives to aid in workability and slow the drying process, milk proteins are dissolved with an alkaline substance to create the glue in which pigments or dyes are dispersed. This could be lime, borax or a proprietary mix. Prussian blue is not available in a casein medium.

Many years of happy painting followed. I was lucky to show large textures on board and small studies at Rochford and Messick art gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe. I am still grateful to them for the opportunity to pursue painting in large format. 

When the financial crashes shrank the art market overnight, another long hiatus intervened.

Wishing to show at last how all those paintings were created, I started Ingrid Williams Casein Painting on YouTube. But the joke is on me. Someone who experimented relentlessly will, of course, continue to do try things out.  Don’t expect me to show you an image and then how to render it expertly in casein.  But I might say, “See this blue and this yellow? If we mix them together, I think I know what they will do…”