Nick Goss Grinds a Mineral Into His Medium, Then Builds Paintings to Destroy Them

♦ ♦ ♦ MAY 21, 2026 | 4 MIN READ Nick Goss Grinds a Mineral Into His Medium, Then Builds Paintings to Destroy Them At a Glance Reading Paul Carey-Kent's May interview with Nick Goss, two things stop a working painter cold: the mineral he grinds into his own medium for a green he cannot fully predict, and the fact that he builds elaborate layered paintings mainly so he can destroy them. There is a green in Nick Goss’s new painting s that will not hold still, and it did not come out of a tube. In Paul Carey-Kent’s May “Interview of the Month” for Artlyst, tied to Goss’s show “Eel Pie Hotel” at Josh Lilley in London (on view through May 23), Goss explains where it comes from. He grinds fuchsite, a pale transparent mineral close to malachite, straight into his own medium. “You mix it in and add a tiny bit of cobalt blue, maybe a bit of burnt sienna, and get a really weird, slightly unplaceable green.” I read that and stopped. What follows is mostly my read, as a painter, of what Goss is doing, because the interview is generous with the how and quiet on the why. Why a painter would engineer a colour he cannot control Most painters spend a working life trying to hit the exact green and hold it. A painter learns the pigments , learns that a phthalo will bully everything beside it and a chromium oxide will sit flat and dependable, and mixes toward a target. Goss is doing the opposite. Fuchsite is a mineral, not a milled pigment. It glitters because it has never been ground into uniform submission. It scatters light its own way. Adding cobalt blue and burnt sienna does not tame it; it gives the unpredictability somewhere to live. So the unplaceable green is not a happy accident. It is engineered unpredictability. Goss has built a colour that behaves one way in morning light and another under a lamp, that nobody, himself included, can fully name. For a painter that is a confidence move. A painter only hands control to the material when the rest of the picture can be trusted to carry the decision. What “almost like a fresco” actually means for the surface Carey-Kent records a phrase a collector should not skim past. Goss’s medium, he says, evaporates as it dries, leaving the pigment attached “almost like a fresco.” A painter hears that and knows exactly what Goss is after: matte. True fresco is pigment bound into wet plaster, no oil sheen, a surface that absorbs light instead of bouncing it. It is also stuck to a wall forever. What Goss has done is build a paint that gives fresco’s chalky, light-drinking surface on oil on linen, on a canvas that can leave the studio and hang in a room. He wants the wall painting without the wall. That matters for anyone living with one of these painting s. A matte, pigment-forward surface ages differently from a glossy varnished one. It will not throw a window’s reflection back across the room. It holds colour as colour, not as a shine. The strange green stays strange because nothing slick is sitting on top of it. Why he bui