…finding your favorite color from your favorite brand of paint on clearance at the art supply store. Apparently they’re not carrying the brand anymore and marked them all half off their already discounted prices!

Oil paintings have been found in caves behind the two ancient colossal Buddha statues destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban, suggesting that Asians — not Europeans — were the first to invent oil painting.

Many people worldwide were in shock when the Taliban destroyed the Buddha statues in the Afghan region of Bamiyan.

Behind those statues are caves decorated with paintings from the fifth to ninth centuries.

New experiments performed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) show that the paintings were made of oil, hundreds of years before the technique emerged in Europe. The results are detailed in the peer-reviewed Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry.

More can be found here in Live Science.

Adding images to the gallery is proving to be a challenge. Rounding up the jpgs of all those paintings is trying as they’re backed up all over the place. After all, I’m an artist and not a librarian! Also, the image files don’t have the actual sizes IDed on them so I’m relying on my somewhat feeble memory there. Shortly I’ll be going through what I have remaining and checking my records to get those sizes in there but for now my guesses will have to suffice.

A while back my server crashed and I’ve not been enthused about restoring the old website so I’m starting off fresh. A literal blank white canvas for me to sprawl out on. More is certainly to come.