Industry News

Important Information on Cadmium Paints from ColArt

“To our valued ColArt customers,

As a leading manufacturer of top fine art brands we have had to make choices concerning the production of some of our products which contain raw materials that are not environmentally friendly.  With a vision to being more environmentally responsible, we have decided to reduce our production of colors which contain these specific raw materials; heavy metal pigments.

There are obvious benefits of Cadmium Colors to fine artist and for that reason we are being very selective on where these reductions will be taken, i.e. not across every brand and every range we manufacture.  Therefore, we will continue to make Cadmium Colors for the most important fine art ranges in our portfolio on a daily basis.  By reducing the number of cadmium containing colors across our product ranges, it will allow us to more safely and ecologically manufacture these items.

Our focus for this Cadmium transition will be:

  • Provide Cadmiums for all artist quality ranges in the bestselling sizes
  • Discontinue cadmiums in all student ranges with one exception:  Winton 37 & 200ml
  • For the student ranges with discontinued cadmium colors, we will develop replacement hues in 2013, where an alternative doesn’t already exist
  • Replace all cadmium colors in all sets with cadmium hue colors or other colors that make sense.  This includes both Artist and Student grade sets.

The following ranges represent the artist grade ranges/sizes that will continue to carry their existing color range of Cadmiums:

  • AOC 37 ml
  • WOC 37 ml & 200 ml
  • Artisan 37 ml
  • AAC 60 ml
  • AWC 5ml, 14 ml and Half Pans
  • Designers Gouache 14ml
  • Liquitex HB 59 ml

We will cease production of all Cadmium colors in the following ranges:

  • AOC 200 ml
  • Artisan 200 ml
  • Griffin 37 ml
  • AAC 200 ml
  • AWC 37 ml & Large Pans
  • CWC – All Sizes
  • Galleria – All Sizes
  • Liquitex SB 59 ml & 237 ml
  • Liquitex HB 138 ml & 946 ml

For those where we will discontinue the Cadmium colors, these will only be available until supplies last and ours and distributors inventories are depleted.  In some cases we have already run out of inventory and will start to delete back orders in our system.  All of these items will be changed to discontinued status in our system immediately.

For your convenience we have attached an excel spreadsheet that details by sku which items will be discontinued and which will be manufactured.  You will also see the details on which replacement cadmiums/colors will be launched in 2013.

Obviously this makes for a lot of disruption to the merchandizers in your stores and we fully appreciate the work it will take to make these changes.  We will be trying to mitigate the difficulty as best we can with support from both our sales staff assisting in store and our marketing staff assisting with a simplified retro-fit kit per rack.  More detailed information will be coming soon on when those kits will be available.

Thank you in advance for your support and understanding in this matter, and your continued patience as we work through this significant undertaking.

Sincerely,

Patrick Brennan
ColArt Americas, Inc.

Vice President of Sales
P.O. Box 1396
Piscataway, New Jersey 08855-1396″

To download a listing of the affected skus, click here or ask your MacPherson’s contact.

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