Arizona Daily Star
July 17, 2005

Get it made in your shade - C J Volk is a woman obsessed with creating your perfect paint
By Gillian Drummond

C J Volk loves watching paint dry. Come to think of it, she thrives on it. It's hard to imagine that of somebody so creative, dynamic and, well, downright talkative. But paint - and the color it dries to - is her business.

This is a woman who casts lengthy gazes at painted walls, marveling at how the light catches it at certain times of day, the depth of the color, the surface sheen. She gets excited about the chemistry of paint, the molecular makeup of it.

Volk has always been obsessed with color, having morphed from textile designer to interior designer. But one day, in her effort to find the right color for a client's walls, she grew desperate.

"She wanted a pale caramel color, and they kept looking so bad. It was like having theater makeup smeared on your wall," Volk says, laughing about her store-bought samples.

So she tried mixing the paint herself. Her client had to wait 2_ months until Volk got it just right - and in the process she became fascinated.

Volk began obsessing about how she might replicate other colors: the green of palo verde trees, or the fur of a neighbor's Labrador puppy. She created more paints, selling to individual clients, until her business grew, paint took over from interior design, and Citron Paint & Design was born.

In the multibillion-dollar world of household paint, Volk is both a maverick and an upstart.

What makes her angry, she says, is that people are blaming themselves when the paint colors they buy in the large stores end up looking nothing like the tiny sample cards they pick up.

They think it's them, and yet they're picking from an ink sample that's infinitesimally small compared to the surface they're going to put it on. And it's not about them. It's about an industry that has sat on its laurels acting like they're color companies."

Most household paint is made up of two or three pigment colors and a black or gray dye - a combination that, Volk says, deadens color.

Volk follows what fine artists do and blends eight to 15 pigments in each of her paints, with no black or gray. This, she says, creates much richer color. She spends around five minutes mixing each color - as opposed to the 20 seconds the large companies take - then waits for a daub of it to dry.

So what you see in the glass jars of paint that line the shelves of her Northeast Side store is what you'll get on your walls, Volk says. And just so clients can get a realistic idea of the colors, she hangs 4-foot-square samples on the walls of her store.

This "boutique paint" store doubles as a gift shop, with glassware, candles, stationery, and pieces of furniture also for sale.

"People usually show paint in a really ugly warehouse," Volk says. "I like to see it displayed next to the kinds of things you'd have in your home."

Each of her 80 colors has a name and a story behind it, and all are listed on her website and related in funny and touching accounts that provide an insight into Volk's own life.

There's Lala's Laugh, a blushing rose color names after her "cool" grandmother and her infectious laughter. There's Bubble Bath, a pink shade inspired by a giggly soak in cheap bubble bath that Volk's sons bought her. (She had really wanted aromatherapy oils, but hey, they're men.) And there's Magic Hour, as her family likes to call Tucson's evening light and the halo it makes over the desert.

The gospel according to Citron is spreading fast, and not just in Tucson, where Volk is in the process of moving two doors up to give her more space. Volk has appeared in numerous national magazines and newspapers, and her business has been heralded as a breath of fresh air - and fresh color.