I am reading “The World is Blue”, by Sylvia Earle. This informative book is passionate, if scary, and I am rethinking my assumptions. She quotes decade-long president of the Nature Conservancy , John C. Sawhill, as saying, “In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy.”
For some time it has bothered me how much of my life involves plastic. My painting medium itself is a plastic, as is the packaging that contains it. How can I preach walking lightly on the earth while my medium is so, well, plastic? I have been inspired recently by creative people selling all manner of things they have made on etsy. So, I will be taking a long-considered plunge into unfamiliar territory and changing the way I create art. My plan is to make use of all that paper that comes in the door in the form of fliers, etc, and paint on those using watercolors. Watercolors come in cakes, not plastic tubes, and (I believe) the binder is nontoxic. The resulting work will not be archival, but then again, how archival does art really need to be? The more I study art, the more I conclude that work created much before our time is rarely…um, relevant. I fear that comment will unleash some strong comment. In any event, this is one thing I want to do to reduce the impact I leave on the earth. I’ll keep you posted how the experiment works. I am sure I’ll run into snags, which will be interesting to solve.
