Do you ever feel like the world is ganging up on Titanium White? No?

Sometimes I feel this way and on those days I like to wear my Team Titanium T-shirt. Available in many attractive sizes and colors. Or, at least, in white size large.

Today was one of those days. I was innocently in the painting studio class, painting away at various landscapes, still lifes, and so on, and was informed that Titanium, Color of Colors, kills the hues of all colors it is mixed with. No!

This reminds me of the first time I bought oil paint. Prepare yourselves for a long and improbable story.

I was in Spain and had lived there approximately 1 month. I wanted a change, baby. No more acrylic for me.

Spanish stores are the old fashioned kind where everything is behind glass and some sneering shop keeper demands to know what you want and then might or might not get it for you depending how many pushy old ladies try to get in line ahead of you. Well, not every store is this way. But the paint store was.

So was the cheese store. And in the US, the dairy industry is only viable because of the demand for cheese used in pizza. Or so they* tell me.

None of this is relevant.

So I approached it warily. A skinny smoking woman was behind the counter. A Spaniard. Her name was most likely Maria. Let us think of her as Maria in any case.

So I ordered some paint and then I asked for some turpentine.

Sample conversation re: Turpentine in Spain (translated from the Spanish)
Me: And also Turpentine. But preferably the kind that won’t kill me.
Maria: That won’t kill you? With a pistol? HA HA HA (makes guns with hands and shoots me)

Then she gave me regular turpentine, well in fact I have no idea what she gave me. The kind that’s highly toxic but which does not have a pistol, presumably.

So this Turpentine was basically the Titanium White of paint thinners, a sly mass murderer, and I would just like to salute all the paintings I did in my closet sized bedroom, and also the anger of my host family when I opened the window in the dead of winter so as to not suffer brain damage from the fumes.

What brain, you might well ask?

There’s no smart in art, as I always say.

What’s the difference, it’s not like we had heat! We really didn’t.

To the memory of Turpentine past:

Manifesto Re: Titanium White

I would like to take this opportunity to affirm my dedication to Titanium, not just as a color of paint, but as a lifestyle.

I live Titanium.

And I would like to see anyone try to stop me.

*the vet students