It’s a gloomy day in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Grey clouds are heavy with the threat of rain, casting a shadow over looming hills, upon whose heights one is tempted to wuther. It’s here, between the Three Peaks, that Rebecca Wallace and Pip Seymour hand-craft acrylics, oil paints, watercolours, ancient drawing materials and dry pigments for their fine-art-product business, Wallace Seymour.
‘You feel a lot of space around you all the time – a huge amount of space and openness,’ Pip remarks. From inside their main factory, the Pen-y-ghent fell peeks through a single crescent-shaped window, set high on the wall. This landscape creeps inside too, in the form of jars of ground pigment, picked from the earth beyond, which line the windowsill.
The pair are based in a modest industrial lot flanked by the Ingleton quarry. From here they source the rock that’s fundamental to their pale green/grey oil paint, ‘Ingleton Green Earth’. Seen from the outside, this cluster of buildings – of which Wallace Seymour occupies three stone units – looks more like a place you might come to get your car MOT’d than a workshop for the raw ingredients of art and atmosphere. In the main unit, plastic bags and glass jars are identified with labels reading ‘Smut’, ‘Waning Moon Charcoal’ and ‘Hangman’s Ochre’ (the latter – shards of mineral pigment that are used for drawing – is made from yellow ochre freshly dug from a local farmer’s land), making the functional space feel more akin to an alchemist’s laboratory.
Across the way is their third space, where salvaged shelves display more jars, one containing minerals scraped from the inside of a volcano in Tuscany. Hi-vis stickers warning of hazardous chemicals leer through a glass-fronted cabinet nearby, remnants from its past life in a school science wing. Opposite stand wooden racks from the old Wedgwood factory in Stoke-on-Trent, and framed landscapes are stacked against the walls. Artists themselves, Rebecca and Pip are keen alfresco painters. ‘You work in a more instinctive way [outside], I think, because you’re forced to,’ says Rebecca. Their most recent exhibition, Langdale Glisk, at the Heaton Cooper Studio in Grasmere, Cumbria, was inspired by a series of paintings they made of that area over the course of a year. ‘Quite often when you’re working outside, things will happen, like rain will fall and wind will take the paper away,’ Pip says, pointing to a striking watercolour where the dark paint runs sideways across the paper in streaks. Right on cue, the high corrugated roof above us resounds with a percussive tattoo of raindrops as the heavens finally make good on their threat.
Water is a central part of Pip’s creative process. ‘Often I take [my paintings] outside and literally drench them with water and slowly start building up layers,’ he says. Luckily, water is abundant in the wild uplands he and Rebecca frequent. ‘If we’re painting outside, we get the water from the stream,’ Pip says. ‘It has a particular odour, a freshness’ – which, he adds, reminds him of his childhood in Bradford, swimming in local rivers.
When I visit, Pip is mixing a fresh batch of oil paint using ‘Leighton Red Ochre’ at a small machine. The pigment was collected from a derelict iron-ore mine down the road. The raw nature of such ground materials gives Wallace Seymour paints a distinctively coarse texture. ‘Most colours are made smooth,’ says Rebecca. ‘There’s not much energy in the paint. I wanted something that has a liveliness to it.’ Pip scrapes the rich, ruddy paste and feeds it back into the machine. ‘Every colour has a different recipe,’ he tells me. Some of their creations are endlessly repeatable, whereas others use ingredients that are rare and less accessible (like that volcano paint).
I leave thinking about how magical and essential it must feel to paint a place with itself, using its own components; to make the paints with which you capture it. A strange and strikingly recursive pleasure. Later, as my train pulls from the platform, I look out across the landscape. The weather has only worsened since I arrived but, with a new appreciation for colour, I see the grey clouds are now deepened with blue, and the rich brown soil glitters with violet and red.
For more information, visit wallaceseymour.co.uk. Its products are available from choosingkeeping.com
