We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Seren Morey. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Seren below.
Seren, appreciate you joining us today. Can you recount a story of an unexpected problem you’ve faced along the way?
Six months after entering in to a partnership to try to fix a small diamond in the rough artist paint business in trouble, 9/11 hit. My husband and I were totally green, knowing nothing about business or paint chemistry. Our retail store was on 13th street in the East Village of Manhattan and the City had basically been shut down below 14th St after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. There was no internet as yet, so we completely relied on the retail store being open. We switched to mostly phone orders during that time. We were also dealing with handtrucking all of our packages to the post office around the corner because our UPS service had been suspended. Meanwhile, collection agency letters from suppliers started coming in and there was a Konica copy machine contract that had been defaulted on that we inherited. Konica attempted to shutter the business but my husband successfully negotiated with them and all three of our landlords (the retail store and two storage spaces for pigment) to keep the doors open. Other challenges that ensued were having to suddenly move out of our collapsing pigment warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in 2002 due to damage caused by piledriving next door. In 2008 and 2012 the stock market crash and then Hurricane Sandy threw us for a loop. Polticial turmoil in 2016 had a bad impact on business and then of course Covid in 2020. Our dear friend and business partner Art Guerra passed away in 2021 which was quite traumatic and then in 2022 a new landlord arrived at our retail store, quadrupled the rent and wanted an exorbitant security deposit and triple net lease. Needless to say we had to leave our store that we had occupied since 1986. We successfully consolidated the retail operation to our warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn but soon after in 2023 our landlord there informed us that they would need to sell and all tenants had to depart. We decided we had to find a way to purchase something for the sake of security and after 7 months of extreme hardship in a real estate market with little to no small industrial inventory we found our dream building in Maspeth, Queens. In 2024, through great duress and without help from movers, we moved 55,000 lbs of pigment with multiple Uhaul trips to our new location. The current instability of the economy and the looming energy crisis are our most pressing issues now, but after weathering so many storms we expect to manage this as well. It’s been 26 years of one step forward, two steps back but we are making incremental progress. Slow and steady wins the race.
Seren, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Guerra Paint and Pigment Corp was founded by Arthur Guerra in 1986. Art was an artist and muralist in NYC in the 80’s. He was frustrated with the lack of color quality of the paint he was using and decided there had to be a better way.
He happened to stumble upon a set of antique Color Index Books (pigment encyclopedias) outside a dumpster in SoHo and he was fascinated. He then set about tapping the knowledge of the larger Paint & Coatings Industry and invented The Paint Component System for artists and designers. He wanted to make it easy for artists to make the paint of their dreams. His vision was to supply the highest possible quality raw materials at the lowest possible price. Art was also very much a rebel who was on a mission to tell the truth about art materials and where they came from. He felt that there was a lot of misinformation about pigments in the art materials market and wanted to teach artists the truth about where their materials come from. For Instance – many artists still think that all pigments come from rocks and minerals when in fact most pigments are manufactured in laboratories for the larger color industry (automotive, plastics, etc.). Some true earth colors are mined out of the ground but the majority of pigments are synthesized in laboratories through organic chemistry. All art materials companies acquire their pigments from these industrial sources.
In 1995 Art came to give a talk on contemporary paint technology at Pratt Institute where I was working on my MFA and I was wowed. I began working at his paint shop on 13th St in the East Village part time and using his materials for my own work. I still remember the first time I squirted out my first dispersion to mix with my acrylic medium i.e.binder. I literally exclaimed “What the F#%&!”. I had never experienced pure color like that. I remember saying out loud angrily “how did I not know about this before?”. Years later, when it became clear that Art needed help or the whole thing was going under, I knew something had to be done. I asked my husband Jody, who was a writer and musician at the time, “Do you want to help save a cool artist paint business?” He said OK and the terrifying and thrilling roller coaster ride began. I managed the financials and the retail and Art taught Jody the way of the paint cowboy. He taught him the coded pigment language, how to acquire pigments and make dispersions and binders from raw materials. He also introduced him to some very important paint industry professionals who Jody later expanded his knowledge with to perfect our dispersion and binder formulas.
One of the things we have done as a business is to amass a large collection of the finest quality, lightfast artist suitable pigments as they were being phased out of industry production due to lack of demand and/or cost to manufacture reasons. Over the years, as smaller specialty pigment manufacturers have been acquired by larger companies the original wide selection of extremely unique high performance pigments has diminished. We have made it our mission to rescue these colors from true extinction. We have over 50 pigments from our collection of over 200 single pigments that are rare and “extinct”. We have adopted this nomenclature for powdered pigments that are no longer manufactured but we retain a large supply in our collection that we grind into liquid pigment dispersions and make available to artists.
The basic idea of The Paint Component System revolves around the principle of the liquid pigment dispersion i.e. pigment concentrate. All pre-made paint is made with these pigment concentrates that have been ground down from a dry pigment to a liquid concentrate. Our system gives artists the opportunity to work with the pure pigment raw materials and to control the saturation and brilliance of their color by adding the color themselves to the paint base.
The formula is simple: Pigment Dispersion + Binder = Paint.
The difficult part of paintmaking is the grinding of the pigment and we do that for you. Powdered pigments need to be ground because they are in agglomerates (magnetically charged and stuck together) that need to be separated. We grind our pigments the old fashioned way with antique ceramic ball mills that produce the finest grind at what is called the Hegman 8. This produces the cleanest, brightest color and allows the pigment to be at its full brilliant potential. The current industrial method of grinding pigments with a steel blade only brings the color to a Hegman 6.
We feel strongly that artists stand to benefit greatly from making their own paint. When you work with pure single pigments (not mixtures) and you control your saturation by adding the color yourself, you achieve the highest level of pure color brilliance. Our artist predecessors all made their own paint and we encourage artists to return to their roots. By creating the paint yourself you also open up the range of possibilities of what can be achieved not only with color, but with surface sheen and texture. Experimenting gets the creative juices flowing and allows the artist to connect with their materials in a way previously not possible. When you are more connected to your paint, you are more connected to your painting, and the result shows. We do a lot of teaching here. I used to be a professor of Light Color and Design as well as Materials and Techniques at Pratt Institute and our staff are also great teachers. We regularly do demonstrations and walk people through how easy and fun it is to make their own paint. We also troubleshoot with people over the phone or via email. We consider ourselves a resource for artists and want to help artists achieve the paint of their dreams! We are artist owned and operated and as such are quality driven at an affordable price point. Particularly when you are doing large scale paintings and murals, you can save a fortune. We also have a lot of plaster customers that tint their walls with our dispersions. All of the Anthropologie stores have tinted plaster walls with our color. Additionally, we recently just started having shows in a room we have designated as SHOWROOM Gallery curated by our good friend and customer William Norton.
Our company logo is Master Your Materials and we definitely have a cult following of artists that regularly say “I can not do what I do without you!”
How’d you meet your business partner?
I met my husband and business partner Jody Bretnall at Bard College. I was studying painting and he was studying theology and literature while playing bass in a rap band that was doing a lot of playing around New York City. We were friends through Junior year and Senior year started dating. I had a lot of fun going to his shows. They had quite a few at CBGB’s and Rage Against The Machine even opened up for them one time. When we graduated we moved to the city and shacked up together in Greenpoint and then Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In 1996 we got married in our loft building on the waterfront in Kent ave. A few years later we got involved with a metal band together. We called it Swing Metal because it had a groove. Art Guerra used to come to our shows. We all had some crazy times together.
Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?
There were so many of these moments, I don’t even know how I am still standing. I tried to summarize them in the first question and I could expound upon any of them with a shudder, but there were a few great miracle moments that helped us survive and carried us through. Here is just one:
We were running our whole operation with three 2.5 gallon ceramic jar mills. Jody knew we needed bigger and better equipment if we were going to survive. There was a former weather balloon factory auction that somebody tipped us off to and Art and Jody saw that they had ceramic lined ball mills available. They went and the room was full of scrap metal guys that only wanted metal things so Jody thought he was in the clear for the mills. Then this guy comes out of nowhere and keeps upping the bidding and Jody lost one of the mills. Jody chatted him up and it turned out they were mutual survivors of serious life threatening accidents and brain damage. The guy’s name was Jim and he had a used equipment business in Jersey called Champion Trading. Jim said to Jody “I’m sorry you lost that mill”. Jody said “if you are really sorry about that don’t bid on the next mill”. The bidding started and the room was silent for a bit and then Jody said “$50!” More silence and then “Sold!”. Jody remembers Art exclaiming and saying “Did we just get that for $50 bucks?!!!” Jim let Jody get another mill as well and those mills kept us in business. We have since bought more necessary equipment directly from Jim, he was a great contact to make.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.guerrapaint.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/guerrapaint/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GuerraPaint/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCubk_hZ4_Cc5goY_LE4PRyg/videos
Image Credits
Ambrosia Sullivan for the painting of our building.
the team is comprised of ourselves and Madelyne Harmon and Erwin Fonacier
The group shot in our gallery is artists William Norton, Chris Ketchie and Al Rodriguez. The artwork in the room is Yukari Edamitsu