“Eek!” cries the Eco-Warrior

I have always considered myself a bit of an eco-warrior, concerned about environmental matters and vegetarian since my student days.

Attitudes that seemed rather quaint or extreme forty-plus years ago are now considered very mainstream: re-cycling, up-cycling, sustainable energy.

And then there is my art.

It suddenly struck me the other day as being the ultimate irony that my work is all about Nature and my relationship with the environment, but it is all expressed in …. acrylic paint.

Plastic paint.

Contained in plastic tubes or tubs.

Micro-plastics being washed down the sink every time I clean my brushes and who knows what heavy-metals and toxic pigments.

Maybe I should explain how I came to use acrylics in the first place.

I used to paint in oils, predominantly because, back in the day, the quality of acrylic paint was not great. The colours were quite chalky and the texture was very runny and unsatisfactory. Oil paint is delicious: thick and rich, so working with it is a very physical, visceral experience. However, I then started to work in mixed media and that was not great when using oils, because of the slow drying time and the fact that oil paint is not very effective as a glue!

Over the years, as I shifted back towards painting once more, I developed a technique using glazes: painting or drawing across the glaze with paint or inks, before applying further glazes. A technique I continue to use to this day. Once again, I ran in to the problem of slow drying time with oils, but – hurrah! – by that time the quality of acrylics had so improved, I slipped seamlessly in to being a fully committed acrylics painter.

As happens during the career of creatives, I can sense a desire bubbling up inside me to return to explore the use of mixed media, integrating found objects and creating collages (the subject for at least one other blog, because finding non-toxic and eco-glues/adhesives is another problem), but the vast quantities of acrylic paint I use – and waste – remains a concern for me.

One salve to my conscience is the fact that the huge majority of paint I use is in my work, creating images which have a guaranteed permanence of colour, so will not fade or deteriorate (as long as they are properly varnished – the number of artists who don’t varnish paintings in either oils or acrylics is quite extraordinary)

I don’t think that my worry would be any less if I returned to work in oils (solvents, heavy metals, the list goes on), but acrylics seem particularly insidious as they appear innocuous with that idea of being ‘water soluble’ (which they actually aren’t…. more complicated chemistry).

So what to do?

Disposing of the huge supplies that I have in store would seem to be the ultimate studio eco-sin, and so I plough on.

I shall continue my use of my acrylic paint supply, but try to waste less and develop a home-spun filtering system to deal with water waste. I am also re-visiting my reference books, long collecting dust, on making pigments from natural resources, and researching the very limited number of suppliers of sustainable artist paints

Meanwhile, all of us landscape artists, wafting about, pronouncing great words about our relationship with the environment need to cop on and fess up…. and start thinking about how to move forward in a more sustainable and planet-saving way.