Dunavi
Studio
Materials
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7 min read
Why I grind my own madder lake
Tube reds are reliable and flat. The red I make by hand from madder root is neither — and that is exactly why it stays on my palette.
Ilona Dunavi
Painter & founder
A red that refuses to sit still
Every autumn I order a few kilos of dried madder root from a grower outside Évora. It arrives looking like kindling. Three weeks later, after soaking, simmering, precipitating and drying, it becomes a powder the colour of a bruised plum — and a little of it ends up in nearly every painting that leaves this studio.
Commercial alizarin is a single, stable molecule. Natural madder carries a whole family of them, so it shifts from rose to brick depending on how thinly it is laid down and what it sits beside. In a glaze over warm grey it glows; in a thick scrape it goes almost black.
I don’t use it because it is old-fashioned. I use it because it behaves like a living thing on the canvas.
The trade-offs
Hand-made lake is slower to dry and less lightfast than its synthetic cousin, so I only use it in layers that are sealed under oil and cold wax, and every finished work is varnished with a UV-filtering resin. Collectors receive a short care sheet that explains exactly where the madder sits in their painting.
If you visit the studio, ask to see the jars. There are eleven of them on the windowsill, each from a different batch, and no two are the same red.
