Denise and Mariam Lambert, the alchemists of pastel blue

By Litza Georgopoulos

Posted today at 17:34

In the greenish liquid of the plastic tub, Mariam dipped and submerged the cotton cloth using the broom handle, making sure to expel any air bubbles, and only two minutes later, she did. withdrawn. The fabric came out tinted in a light acid yellow then, very quickly, turned to pale green then to dark green, to finally adopt a blue coloring.

The young woman wrung and hung the piece of fabric from the horizontal bars installed along the wall above a row of basins. Then she continued her demonstration of pastel dyeing with different textiles. In the modest and rudimentary workshop, the “degreening”, the magic of the oxidation of the pigment in the natural fibers, operates every time.

Old tannery

Mariam and her mother Denise settled here in Roumens, a small village in Lauragais in the heart of the blue triangle formed by Albi, Toulouse and Carcassonne. This land of plenty enjoyed great prosperity thanks to the pastel trade, at its peak in the 16th century.e century, until, its declining quality, it was supplanted by indigo, then synthetic dyes. But the Lambert family’s love story for theIsatis tinctoria started in the mid-1990s.

Denise is American, Henri is Belgian, together they set up a contemporary art gallery in the village of Redu, with nearly 400 inhabitants in the Ardennes. Then they head south with their two children in the direction of the more lenient Gascony, and settle in Lectoure, a town in Gers with an art and history label, in a former 15th century tannery.e century. While renovating the old house, the discovery of four shutters painted in blue will sharpen their curiosity.

From left to right, the raw pastel pigment.  For the preparation of the mother vat, Denise adds a little powder of natural indigo pigment to the pastel, which gives a darker color.  The contents are then poured into a beaker placed on a heating magnetic stirrer.

“We understood later that this blue ‘wheelwright’ which farmers used at the time to paint the horns of cows and oxen, plows and carts, came from the bases of dye vats, which smelled very bad, like the vats of tanners, but attracted much less insects ”, explains Denise. “People have associated these repellant properties with color, but actually it was because of the uric acid that was once inherent in the preparation. ”

“Recipes” kept secret

From then on, the duo has never ceased to dig into the fascinating history of the pastel of the dyers of Occitanie. In partnership with farmers and the Ariège Plain Cooperative, they will cultivate the dye plant with small yellow flowers, researching in old books the “recipes” for extracting the pigment, which most often were jealously kept secret. and transmitted orally.

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