How might the artist’s materials relate to the artwork’s meanings and methods?
For artwork about nature, and from an ecological perspective, the artist’s choice of materials can be borne of sustainable or ‘circular economy’ methods and approaches. In the Timepieces series, the specific art media relate to visual effects, art histories, and various types of sustainability in practice: silverpoint from recycled/upcycled sources, found meteorite from known impact sites, specific types of acrylic paint, panels made from certified and carefully managed forests…
Silverpoint: for the aesthetics of its tarnishing, reflectivity and beauty, I often rely on silverpoint drawing. Silverpoint is a small piece of silver, that leaves a mark somewhat like a graphite pencil mark. A little goes a long way — the several utensils that I have that I’ve repurposed for drawing will last a lifetime of mark-making. That so little is needed is an environmental choice of minimizing the impact of art-making. I’ve acquired the silver that I use mainly from tag sales and antique stores in Vermont… this is not large-scale recycling or upcycling, but it does tie the art to core eco-friendly concepts of reuse and denying throwaway habits. People have mined silver for about 5,000 years, and silverpoint also has a long history of use in several art traditions, such as from the Renaissance onwards, as a mode of making preliminary drawings and under-drawings. For human health, silver is non-toxic and non-hazardous, and generally safe elsewhere in the environment (provided that one doesn’t ingest high doses of it, or is not allergic to it). To me the use of silver also implies the innovations and odd values that we place on various metals, and the long histories of their use, which is indeed a sociopolitical intrigue hinted at in part by the designs present in various antiques and cultural leftovers:
Meteorite: often made mostly of iron, or iron and nickel, meteorite can be used for metalpoint drawing. Meteorites provoke pre-historic references, as the material predates the formation of the Earth and may be several billion years old. They prompt associations with vast astronomical timespans, forces fundamental to the formation of the Earth and other planets, our varying orbits around the Sun, and so on. I purchased small pieces of meteorite from reliable suppliers who record and document the specific impact site that the stone comes from, meaning that scientific data and ecological/enviromental data has already been recorded and documented. Such suppliers sometimes sell small pieces of iron meteorites for less then ten dollars – and like silverpoint, a small piece could last a lifetime of drawing. In the sense that cycles of gravity, supernova, orbits, and planetary dynamics participate in the making of meteorites (in an obvious way), drawing with meteorite may provoke associations with much longer timespans than the human-made designs and values present with silverpoint.
Acrylic-based Silverpoint Medium and Gesso: it’s a common concern among eco-minded artists that one’s choice of paints be a healthy, sustainable, or recyclable product. Paints are generally made of a vehicle, pigments, and a binder. Thus three basic shortcuts can help for selecting eco-friendly paint: choose water-based paint, choose non-toxic and non-hazardous pigments, and choose biodegradable or otherwise low-impact binders made by ecologically-minded manufacturers.
A water-based vehicle is helpful if non-toxic and non-hazardous pigments are selected carefully. The pigments, however, relate to all types of paints. So for example, the titanium dioxide white pigment in fine art paints is non-toxic and non-hazardous, and is not the same as titanium nanoparticles (such as in some sunscreens) that are known to be hazardous to marine environments. Used carefully, artist’s grade titanium white pigment is mostly non-hazardous and non-toxic, and much eco-friendlier than other popular white pigments, such as toxic lead white. Combined with water and safe pigments, the artist is unlikely to create excess environmental problems.
Similarly, the type of binder (acrylic resin) in fine art acrylic paints are often (depending on the brand of paint) non-toxic, non-hazardous, and biocompatible and/or biodegradable. Their environmental impact is different and less than the damaging plastics like polystyrene and PET bottles and PVC pipes that are known hazards and pollution problems, and also are not the same as the ingredients in household latex paints, or variations like older mineral-spirits acrylics. In contrast, the binder in acrylic paints biodegrades into more basic components of carbon and hydrogen and acetic acid (vinegar) in about a month to a year, which is about the same rate as fruits and vegetables and papers, and much faster than cotton t-shirts. How the paint is manufactured also matters… Some fine art paint producers also rely on extensive methods that reduce their ecological impact, for example the silverpoint medium that I use, by Golden Paints, includes manufacturing with significant water filtration methods that help produce a much more sustainable product than what most artists could create on their own.
Other types of water-based paints, such as watercolors with non-toxic pigments, are also environmentally-friendly. But many oil paints, due to their complicated waste management requirements or common additives such as driers and other highly toxic mediums (neurotoxins like mineral spirits, plant-based turpentines, etc.) can be a lot worse for the environment than carefully selected non-hazardous acrylics or watercolors. It is possible to do ‘solvent-free’ oil paintings, which is a lot better for the environment because it avoids the more dangerous materials associated with oils. Careful selection is important, and standard precautions and good waste management for painting must be used regardless of the type of paints.
Wood panels for painting: I prefer FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) lumber products which are verified and sourced from well-managed, sustainably-grown forests. Like paints, several fine art supply manufacturers rely on environmentally-friendly production and resources to craft their products. Of today’s manufacturers, I especially like Ampersand‘s approach, as their products are about as sustainable as it gets, and made without VOC’s or formaldehydes, and so on.
Another option is to re-use or recycle older lumber products — the Timepieces series greatly reduces materials by being repeatedly reused and reworked over time. Obviously though, there’s a tough limit to terms like ‘sustainability’ because clearly the material (wood) is no longer a tree, which was destroyed and reworked to create the panel. This is typical of all art supplies: a material in its raw form has been reconfigured and transformed into the art media. To create an artwork, we destroy something. By minimizing that process we reduce the impact of our destructiveness. Here too, like paint production, artist’s grade products and manufacturing methods are far smaller than lumber production in the construction industry – this brings up the larger environmental / ecological view…
The larger ecological view: fine art supplies and materials such as those in the Timepieces series are unlikely to have a negative ecological impact. Indeed the whole of the fine art supply industry is considerably smaller than the decidedly difficult impacts of the household paint industry, or the construction lumber industry, or the cotton industry (associated with artist’s canvas, for example). The ecological impact of home heating and cooling for the artist’s abode or studio is probably much larger than the impact of the art supplies. So too is the impact of automobiles and transportation, the ecological costs of long-distance shipping, or of computers and today’s cloud servers — all of these pose far greater overall environmental concerns. The large scale of these issues suggests that we should be careful about assigning responsibility for environmental issues to the individual artist (or any single person)… given the scale of the problems, we must instead collaborate to solve large-scale problems by building bold social and political and business policies that can operate at a far larger scale than individual’s art supplies. Regarding how to build such collaborations, I recommend reading Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce and Drawdown, the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals , and the Biden administration’s Building a Clean Energy Economy: the Inflation Reduction Act’s Investment in Clean Energy and Climate Action, which contains significant business incentives and new programs for addressing large-scale issues such as climate change, pollution, ecology and environmental policies. A very simple rule-of-thumb is to electrify everything, using as much sustainable, decentralized energy as possible, which also keeps energy production and funding local. Artists who desire to create environmentally-friendly artworks can support and benefit from public policies that incentivize sustainable industries and clean energy production at far larger, global scales than the individual artist’s use of art supplies.
That much said, if you’d like to create an artwork that is very long-lasting, probably the best material you could use is stone or glass. Glass takes about a million years to biodegrade, and is therefore a lot more long-lasting than most art materials. Certain types of stone might last considerably longer. Both materials are subject to change, slowly, due to ongoing geological forces or even the eventual heat-death of the universe in several trillion years, after all stars burn out all of their fuel. In other words, ecological thinking requires taking natural processes of change into account, to determine how much changed ought to be relevant for the artwork and art materials, and whether such transience is sped up or slowed down by our choices and actions. The planet will be fine in its own ways. But our actions certainly impact many other life forms, and our own species, probably to our own dissolution if we’re not more careful about sustaining the environment when we can. All species eventually pass away and may evolve into other, new species. As such, our choices today may speed up or slow down these much larger natural processes, in turn lengthening human survival and the ecologies we require.
Gregory Scheckler 