​A childhood colour addiction started with just a set of oil paints (from my mother) and a creative mindset to make things. 

Bright pink is my colour, I love to drop a

dob of pink next to red and orange or blue, and then scrape a art palette knife down those colours into parallel lines.

 

Making my own colour started in Sydney

at just 6. My parents from Poland and

Sicily, they were mechanics and started

a engine repair shop and service station in 'The Sydney'. I would break open the half dead car batteries left at the garage,

and without much care took out the lead plates in the acid with pliers, then poured out the acid from the batteries into jars.  

This was my new childhood obsession mixing the acid with coins from under car seats and even chrome badges from old junk cars. I poured these mixtures into empty pickle jars, then studied these co-ordinate metal complexes and chemicals change colour or crystallise. Many colour filled jars were kept, I then changed the out dated, unused 'outback dunny' at the garage into my mini Colour Laboratory! 

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After eating many pickles (not just for the jars) I read about oxidation, nitration and  

electro-plating. This led to chroming my friends BMX bikes, and candy dipping

my colours over the chromed bike parts.

These experiments went on and led to

making explosives from the same acid

and metals as a 'free radical' teenager.

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After university I was contracted by the

Australian Federal Police (AFP) bomb squad, where my technical knowledge was innovative for the organisation, but not very colourful or interesting. Missing ​

the fun of discovery for colour I left and 

took a 'holiday' to Europe & USA. In N.Y

I met many emerging artists, they would 

bring me a jar of pennies to convert into

the copper blue pigments I was always talking about. Just 1000 pennies would get an artist pounds of color. This led to 

working directly with many world renown artists making them many old traditional leads, cadmiums, lakes, and modern pigments for a fraction of the price of expensive pigments in art supply shops.

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I moved back to Sydney as my mother become injured at work and needed help to recover. She then become an art teacher and published a few art books...

I continued on making very rare and unique colours for artists and makers plus many other colour industries in Newcastle and Sydney. Even today I still continue to enjoy the dangerous chemical reactions to feed my own colour addiction and at the same time provide the 'World's best pigments' to artists and all industries that need colour in their lives and work.  ​​