Jonathan Lasker is a New York painter with a long exhibition record. His works are in the permanent collection of such museums as Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the High Museum in Atlanta and the Whitney in New York City, so, quite understandably, he has been interested for some time in the durability of the paints he uses. It was with some horror that Lasker began noticing how the sap-green paint he regularly mixes with white to form a pastel-green background for his paintings began fading to white "all of a sudden," as he described it. "I had been using the same paint for years, and this had never happened. Why was it happening now?" he wondered.
The technical-support people he contacted at the paint’s manufacturer had no answers, but a conservator he asked about the problem explained that the manufacturer had changed the color-pigment compounds, perhaps for financial reasons, making the paint less reliable from Lasker’s vantage point. It is not the first time that the conservator, Albert Albano, who is also executive director of the Cleveland, Ohio-based Intermuseum Conservation Association, has consulted with an artist about a problem with the materials he or she uses. His Rolodex is filled with the names of artists who have called him at one time or another. In fact, Albano has recognized the need for a national clearinghouse of information about art materials that will answer artists’ questions, from the most basic to the very complicated. After almost 10 years of planning and financial backing from paint-maker Golden Artist Colors, he and another art materials expert, Mark David Gottsegen, have recently founded the Art Materials Education and Information Network (AMEIN), which will be based at the offices of the Intermuseum Conservation Association in Cleveland.
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