The practice of painting begins with the earth herself
 

One of the delights of teaching at the Integrated Design and Craft education program delivered by the School of Traditional Arts (KFSTA) at Madrasat Addeera, AlUla, involves showing students how to forage for raw pigment colours in the surrounding desert and oasis’s mountains. Over the last several years, I have been honoured and excited to be part of a team sharing knowledge and expertise in traditional methods of natural colour making and painting skills and techniques.

Under the guidance of one of KFSTA’s leading pigment researchers, artist and tutor Dr David Cranswick, both staff and students have learnt how to read the local landscape and find the colours, usually hidden at the base of large boulders that have fallen from the cliff face, revealing ochres that hide within fissures of rock.

The expertise shared and gained during those years of collective research, teaching and creative explorations are gathered in an exciting new book, The Colours of AlUla: Pigments of the Desert, launched by KFSTA and the RCU in 2025.

As geologist Jan Freedman writes in the book

Central AlUla is dominated by the large mesas with their huge flattopped ridges…the oldest sedimentary rocks in AlUla. … Known as the Siq sandstones, they are a deeper red than any other rocks in AlUla. This is because they contain large amounts of iron particles, which surround each individual grain. When iron is exposed to the air or water, it oxidises and creates the red colour’.

The integrated education experience offered at Madrasat Addeera extends into a Design & Production Studio, where our team teaches local students how to transform these mineral rocks into high-quality, unique, hand-made paint, according to ancient methods. The process, carefully distilled and illustrated in the Colours of AlUla book, involves crushing and washing the rocks, separating its colour into finer particles which can then be made into paint.

In this sense, the practise of painting begins with the earth herself, a ritual transformation that turns mineral stones into luminescent paintings. This process echoes the core principles of our programme, as Dr David

Cranswick Suggests In The Book

The creative process is a journey that brings nature’s raw materials – rocks, plants, bones – into a condition of deep relationship. It is a communion between the artist, the physical materials and form, which is revealed within this state of union. Through the outer nature of craft disciplines and skills, an inner harmonious state can be realised. The crafts are therefore a doorway to an inner place of “being”. This place resides within the heart and is the centre of all creation. It is nowhere and everywhere.

Dr Cranswick has been a visiting tutor for the KFSTA programme in AlUla since its inception in 2018. In 2023 he joined our artist residency programme with the intent to document and refine the recipes our team had developed over the previous five years. David then worked closely with our Design & Production Studio artisans, an interaction that became the inspiration for the book.

This research also led to the establishment of a new strand of specialisation within the Design & Production Studio – Pigments and Painting – dedicated to the preparation and use of pigment colours. I have been personally overseeing this new strand at the Studio, engaging students with painting techniques and skills that bridge miniature painting, illumination and pattern exploration.

A series of paintings have been generated by the students, who, we are proud to say, are in the process of establishing their very own AlUla painting tradition.

Research: The next steps

In the book, I asked the question whether the tombs at Hegra were painted, having found evidence of a plaster substrate which is the traditional base for mural or decorative painting. Since publication, we are delighted to announce that our speculation has been proved correct.

The archaeological team at Hegra (lead by Dr Rut Ballesteros Carrion (Cultural Heritage Conservation Manager) found concrete evidence of painted tombs (both on the façade and interior spaces).

This find provides a new layer to the archaeological and historical record; we hope this will lead to further collaboration with Dr Ballesteros and her conservation team.

The archaeological team at Hegra (lead by Dr Rut Ballesteros Carrion (Cultural Heritage Conservation Manager) found concrete evidence of painted tombs (both on the façade and interior spaces). This find provides a new layer to the archaeological and historical record; we hope this will lead to further collaboration with Dr Ballesteros and her conservation team.

The research methodology pioneered by KFSTA combines academic rigour and traditional craft skills to fully grasp tangible and intangible knowledge systems which have long remained outside formal educational parameters.

What is being achieved at Madrasat Addeera and the KFTSA programme – of which the Colours of AlUla book is but one outcome – allows us to enable these traditional knowledge systems to be transmitted to today’s generation of designer-makers and artisans.

This collective journey is now documented in the book itself, The Colours of AlUla: Pigments of the Desert, available through Madrasat Addeera, Amazon, and the Highgrove Store.
 

Dr Desmond Lazaro
Artist and Senior Manager of The King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts at Madsarat Addeera

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