Carbon footprint
I read an article recently in Art in America; an article on an artist who is making beautiful sculptures from trash that she finds, a la Judy Pfaff. One of her intents is not to continue to proliferate the world with more stuff that contributes to the demise of the planet, acknowledging that much of the materials that we as artists use are toxic to the environment. She is looking to reduce her artmaking carbon footprint.
If I think about it, it seems to me that most artists use materials that has the footprint of Godzilla.
As an oil painter, I have bottles of dried up medium, jars of stagnating turpentine residue and two buckets of rags all ready to be brought to our local toxic waste recycling. I don’t really know that that means, i.e., I don’t really know what the toxic waste recyling section of the dump does with what I bring to them whaen I leave. I would doubt that somehow what I have delivered actually is turned into something non-lethal to the environment.
October 29th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
I wonder if this carbon-footprint-reduction artist has a computer… a cell phone… an ipod… a TV? Did ya know that 70% of the toxic waste found in landfills is electronic waste. We live in an age of consumer choice for sure…. even down to choosing our poison. I’ll take paint poison over electronic poison any day. Of course… a painter could always make their own paint from natural material as artist did centuries ago.
I wonder what size carbon footprint was created in distributing the magazines and making the paper and ink to print the article expounding upon her efforts to “reduce her artmaking carbon footprint?”
No easy answers… Awareness and balance are good guides though. I say if you’re meant to be a painter, paint.