Ulrike Arnold
In the June 2010 issue of the Artist’s Magazine there is an article about German artist Ulrike Arnold. She paints with the outdoors. In the past 20 years she has traveled to 5 continents and many countries and paints en plein air with the elements she finds.
She tries to capture the essence of a place by using the pigments from the earth she finds in rock, sand, mud and clay. She crushes them into a fine powder and mixes them with a transparent binder and uses them as her painting pigments.
Recently, she met Marvin Killgore, a meteorite expert who had collected meteorites from Argentina and Greenland. When he sliced the meteorites for study under a microscope, he also had dust which he had kept. He gladly gave Arnold the dust and now she paints with the material from the cosmos as well, creating abstracts with a little bit of heaven right here on earth. Her website is http://www.ulrikearnold.com