About orange paint

Good watercolors were rare back then. Yuriy Nikolayevich was not capricious, wrote in Leningrad ones, said that in Europe there are no such “earthy” shades. However, he was very happy when friends, Western journalists, historians, brought paints from Italy, England, France …

Once my young friend, the wonderful Katya Tarasova, japanist, called me from Japan and asked what paints would be of interest to Yuriy Nikolayevich, as she found a huge store in Tokyo, where there was absolutely everything for artists. I couldn’t answer anything properly, so I only determined the material — watercolor. After a while, alongside with Japanese sweets, Katya handed over a box of watercolors for Yuriy Nikolayevich.

I still have this little box, he used almost all the colors, but he liked one more than others, and this paint was almost gone. It was orange that is richly pigmented, fantastically bright, and Yuriy Nikolayevich certainly used it in each series for several years in a row, especially when he painted landscapes in Russia.

He took Japanese watercolors with him along with the rest of the boxes — small, large, English, antiquated; we can say that paint boxes have always been the heaviest part of our load.