The Last Hand-Mixed Painter in Lisbon

The first thing you notice in Inês Falcão's studio is the sound: a stone rolling over a slab, patient as a tide. The second is the smell, which is not turpentine and not perfume but something older, a chemist's shop crossed with a garden after rain. She is forty-three years old and she makes every colour she paints with, from scratch, the way it was done four centuries ago.

"I am not nostalgic," she says, in a tone that suggests she has had this argument before. "I am exact. A colour you buy has already made its decisions. A colour you make is still deciding until the moment it touches the panel."

The shelf of stones

The pigments line a shelf like jars in an apothecary: malachite and lazurite, ochres dug from a hillside near Sintra, a black she burned from vine cuttings in an iron pot. Some of them behave. Some of them hate her.

"The green that comes from copper is a small animal," she says. "If the air is humid it will not dry. If it is dry it will crack. I make the green in October, and I plan my year around that fact."

A painting is a slow chemical argument between the artist and the weather. I only referee.

Why she stopped selling

Falcão trained as a conservator, which she calls the best and worst thing that ever happened to her. "You spend ten years reversing other people's materials and you learn exactly which shortcuts die first." When a gallery offered her a solo show in her twenties, she spent a year on the paintings and then watched two of them cloud over in storage. "I repainted them for free. I was so angry. After that, everything I put on a surface had to be able to survive me."

The economics of this honesty are brutal. A single panel can take eight months. She shows rarely, prices high, and takes two students a decade. The rest of the time she grinds, tests, and waits.

What the waiting is for

There is a painting in the far corner of the studio, almost finished, a night harbour in which the water is painted with a grey she has been refining for six years. It looks, in the flat studio light, like silver that has been left out in the rain and decided it prefers it.

"I will know in a year if it works," she says, of the grey. "If the sea and the sky still agree with each other. If they don't, I grind again." She shrugs, the shrug of a person who has made peace with the material world. "The painting is not late. It is only asking."