"It's too bad there isn't a paint that doesn't dry," artist John Pitre of Hawaii told his young apprentice, Tom Deir, as they started the day's work by doing what had to be done every morning: remix the 100-color palette of oil paints that would dry out by day's end. "But there is!" Deir said. "It's called Plastisol."

As a fine artist, Pitre knew well the benefits and drawbacks to both oil and acrylic paints (oil dried slow and acrylic dried too fast), but he'd never worked with Plastisol. Deir, on the other hand, came from the graphic arts world where Plastisol is used for silk-screening. "When I was in high school," Deir explains, "I worked for a company that silk-screened tee-shirts. Plastisol is a heat drying plastic ink, and it's the easiest to use for silk-screening because you heat the porous fabric after printing but the ink won't dry on the screen. That meant the screen never had to be cleaned and could be stored indefinitely for future orders."

The idea of a paint that didn't dry was powerful to Deir because, as Pitre's apprentice, it took him nearly two hours each day to set up the palette and to clean the palette and the brushes. "From that first comment, the seed was planted," says Deir. "We started playing with the idea of finding a paint that wouldn't dry but would have all the positive properties of oil and acrylics (patience and speed)".

What does the average artist know about the chemical make up of paints? Not much. So the first item on the agenda was to discover how Plastisol did what it did. "I learned that Plastisol is a combination of a non-drying oil (a plasticizer), pigment (color) and plastic particles," explains Deir. "When it's heated, some of the oil dissipates but the rest stays soft and doesn't ever really harden (like oil paint does)." As they studied the three ingredients, they realized that the question that had to be answered was: "Is there a combination that will combine to make a paint that acts like the finest oil paint but dries only when it's heated?"

The team of Pitre and Deir set out to find the answer. "I spent a lot my time finding materials and learning," says Deir. "John financed the project and taught me how to paint, and this is how I gained the artist's perspective that John had. Once I understood what kind of rheology [feel] the paint had to have, then I knew what I was looking for. I first had to learn the language of plastics. I talked with a lot of chemists and explained what I was trying to do. Chemists aren't artists (and artists aren't chemists) so I'd get samples of plasticizers, pigments and plastics and mix them and paint with them and heat them."

Over the next five years, Deir and Pitre tested more than 200 different chemical combinations. At the same time, Deir was honing his artistic skills under Pitre's tutelage and paying his personal bills by painting and selling tile murals. "I finally found a combination that had the 'feel' of oil paint, didn't dry until it was heated, and took the pigments perfectly," he says. "But there was one drawback: the paint would darken one full value (10%) when it dried. That's what acrylic paints do too, and that's why so many fine artists prefer oil paints. With oil paints, what you see is what you get.'"

But even with this drawback, the paint was still an incredible advance. A non-drying paint with most of the properties of oil paint was the Holy Grail of the art world! It meant that a jar of the paint could be left open for hours ... days ... years and never dry out! It meant that an artist could start working the minute he walked into his studio and not lose hours setting up and cleaning up! It meant that the artist could work patiently and leisurely; and not have to rush to finish before the paint on their palette dried! It meant for the first time in the world of painting that an artist could control the drying of their paint!

Deir and Pitre contacted artist's paint manufacturers and the largest company in England was very interested. "We flew to England," he says, "and met with the top people of the company. They were very excited about the possibilities. They offered us what seemed to be a great deal: a royalty for eight years during which time we were guaranteed a minimum of a million dollars. At the end of the eight years, they'd own everything."

After the initial excitement of hearing the words "million dollars" wore off, the artists had second thoughts. "We didn't want them owning the whole thing after eight years with us having nothing," says Deir. "So we backed out."

Although they had no deal, they still did have one thing that bothered each of them even more: they had a paint that darkened. The paint could be better. Deir was continuing his experiments with plasticizer/oil combinations. "I was in my tile warehouse late one night with my fiance, Lyn," Deir recalls. "The walls were covered with canvasses, each with a different chemical combinations. We were heating each canvas and suddenly realized one of the combinations did not darken! We had the answer! We had found the right formula!"

The long search was over, but the larger battle -- marketing -- was just beginning.

One of Deir's artist friends introduced him to investors who were intrigued and very impressed with the paint's potential. They offered Pitre and Deir a licensing agreement. "It was a fair offer," says Deir. "They offered us a percentage royalty that we would split. We took it." By now it was mid-'95.

The investors took the paint from R&D to packaged product; they did it all. Calling the new product Matrix Paint Systems, they introduced it to the art world by talking with distributors, retailers and exhibiting at trade shows around the country. But it was an uphill battle; something so radically different was not an easy sell especially to a community steeped in tradition. It would take other visionaries to take the product to the next step.

"I took one look at the Matrix line and thought, 'This is really unique stuff!'" recalls Steven Golden, president of Artskills, an arts and crafts product development company. "I'd been in this business more than 30 years and I knew this was a remarkable product." While Golden instantly assessed the paint's assets, he also knew how difficult it would be to convince artists that it was really as good as it claimed to be. For 500 years, oil paint was the medium used by artists. In the 1950s easy-to-clean-up, water-based acrylic paints were introduced to general nonacceptance. Golden knows first hand how long it took before acrylic paints were accepted; his father was a chemist and partner in the company that developed them. "It takes a very long time for artists to put something new in their arsenal," he says.

Even knowing what lay before him, Golden signed on to represent the new paint, and renamed it "Genesis Artist Colors". "The overarching word about Genesis paints is 'convenience,'" he says. "All of the problems associated with acrylics and oils simply don't exist any more." Golden's task was to find a company that could go beyond what Matrix had been able to do. He needed to find an innovative, aggressive company that believed in the product as much as he did.

"Steve Golden called me and told me he was consulting for a company called Matrix," says Bond Sando, CEO of American Art Clay Co., Inc. (AMACO) of Indianapolis. "He explained what the product was and what it did and I was excited. This wasn't a 'me-too' product. It was totally new, and there was a bonus. It was patented!" In 1998, Sando's then 79-year-old company licensed the rights to Genesis from Matrix Paint Systems. "We created a fine arts division just for Genesis," he says. "Initially, we marketed the product to the fine artist and the leisure painter. We thought that was where our market was." AMACO's expertise was manufacturing and selling ceramic equipment and materials as well as arts and crafts. The company had easy access to the decorative and craft painters but fine arts were a new field for them.

As AMACO was soon to learn, it's hard to turn traditional artists towards new products, and that's probably because very few new products are ever introduced in the fine art world. But that's not true in the world of decorative art. "We suddenly realized that the decorative and craft artists were grabbing it up," laughs Sando. "We had almost held it away from them but they found it. And they loved it! People were using it on boxes, on wood, on tin, on canvas, on anything and everything they could put paint on!"

Sando won't release sales (AMACO is a privately-held company) but when asked to define sales in one word, he says, strongly, "GROWING! We've never had a single person who said they don't like it. A few weeks ago I visited with a dealer in Detroit and we talked with an artist who does beautiful work. The first thing the artist did was thank us for saving him so much money on brushes. He uses a different brush for each color and never has to replace one because he never has dried paint ruin a brush!"

From a business perspective, there is a downside to Genesis. A lot of oil and acrylic paints are thrown out at the end of the day because they dry up overnight. Not so with Genesis. The artist just leaves it on the palette (or in the jar) and starts work the next morning. Nothing has to be thrown out. That's great news for the artist, but makes it a much longer time between reorders for AMACO. "It's the 100,000 mile tire of the art world," laughs Sando.

Steven Golden is able to look at the big picture from the perspective of time. "It took acrylics at least ten years before it received wide acceptance by the art world," he says. "The same thing will happen here. This is a revolutionary new medium, and it will take time. John Pitre and Tom Deir should be very proud of what they've done. I don't know of any painter who was actively involved in the development of a medium. They did something that is very special."