Kelowna artist Mackenzie Perras in front of some of his work.

Image Credit: BC Culture Days

An artist from Kelowna forages through the mountains looking for gemstones, berries, clay and anything else he can process into pigments for his paintings.

Mackenzie Perras is a painter who specializes in making abstract art out of his own paints made from local natural ingredients that he gathers himself.

Perras searched the Okanagan for ingredients to show people how to make paint at his sold out BC Culture Days workshop this weekend at the Rotary Centre for the Arts. 

“I've been in the mountains hunting different rare types of stone and ochre that Indigenous people have used here for thousands of years. Finding umbers and baking different types of earth and foraging sage flowers and using things like B.C. cherries and blueberries to create lake pigments,” Perras said.

He grinds, bakes, mixes and processes paint out of things people walk right past on a typical hike in the Okanagan.

Perras said people would be surprised by the amount of common ingredients that can be mixed with acrylic, or natural binding agents like milk protein, to make paint.

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“I taught the summer youth program at Westbank First Nation, the Indigenous youth, paint making with milk paint,” he said.

“Many of these materials and colours are deeply familiar, even though we don't really go out and dig wild clay very much as a culture or go looking for ochres, you know, these are some of the things that as human beings, it's part of our oldest shared history.”

He said making his own paint is part of his process, and making your own paint is cheaper than a trip to the art shop.

“It's a really different approach to spend days and weeks hiking through forests, looking for certain outcrops of rocks and digging them out and then crushing and hammering them yourself and sifting and levigating them and water grading them and filtering them,” he said.

“If you’ve ever been in an art supply store... it's so, so, so expensive. And so I do love the idea of showing people that there are a lot of things you can make from what's in our backyard.”

Perras is invested in the history of, the really ancient history.

“Ages before people were making pottery, 80,000 years ago, back when we were just becoming human. Some of the oldest archaeological sites are ochre processing sites like Lombos Cave in South Africa,” he said.

"It feels a lot less tied up in compulsory capitalism and more about what you can make with what's at hand."

Click here to learn more about Perras’ art.

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