Making eco-friendly art with Scott Denholm [117]
Scott Denholm is a rapidly emerging and award winning ocean artist, living on the Sunshine Coast, Australia. It was his love of the natural world and previous work which first inspired his art, and also to find ways of making better choices for less impact on the environment. He has gathered a decade of research into The Artist Guide to Eco Friendly Art.
We asked, and you had questions; lots of them! So listen to the conversation and see what changes you can bring to your practice. Which materials make a greener choice? Does it matter what canvas you choose? What else might you want to consider around packaging and marketing? The book has covered a lot of ground and is a thorough guide with links and suppliers and will save you loads of time. So if this is something you have been meaning to look into this is a great start.
While Alice starts by feeling a little guilty that she could be doing more, every decision can add to the impact (or not) we are making so Scott’s advice is just to start with ONE thing… what will be yours?
Buy the book here:https://theartistguide.to/books/artist-guide-to-eco-friendly-art/
(ebook $7US or paperback or buy from Amazon)
Find Scott’s art on his website: scottdenholm.com
Find Scott on Instagram @scottdenholm_oceanart
Mentioned:
Andy Goldsworthy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPDH8yCnlk0
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Credits
“Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
People have been asking how to dispose of acrylic paint. This is for paint water – once paint is dry, it can just go in the garbage. Hope this is useful!
Addendum: Devon Shirley Ronnie was able to say how much to use. I’ve just been winging it. She says: “I use 10 grams of granular aluminum sulfate for each gallon of paint water. This is about ½ Tablespoon, well rounded. Stir vigorously for a couple of minutes. Then add 9 grams of powdered lime per gallon (a scant ¾ Tablespoon). Stir again. The flocculation (isn’t that a great word) when paint solids separate from the water, should start occurring within a couple of minutes. You should start to see a clear layer of water forming as the solids settle to the bottom. For filters, I found a restaurant supply and ordered their large coffee filters for big urns, and use two filters in my old colander. Hope this helps.”
Addendum 2 : a proper filter undoubtedly filters out more paint the a couple of layers of paper towel. This is why I use the stack of filters. Goes like this: Assume the coffee filter gets 99.9%, and the paper towel is really bad and gets 90% each layer. That’s 100 times better for the filter. So, going down the stack, first filter leaves 10%, second filter leaves 10% of that, or 1%, third filter leaves 10% of that, or 0.1% (which is the same as the coffee filter), and the fourth filter leaves 0.01%, which is 10 times better than the coffee filter. If you don’t want a stack like that, do two filtrations and use cheap paper towel on the first which you replace often. The coffee filter will last ten times as long, and you’ll filter ten times as much junk out of your water.
It is also important to note that filtering has almost no effect on paint dissolved in water. Dissolved paint passes right through. The chemicals are simply to solidify the paint into clumps so the clumps get caught by the filter.
Addendum 3: And yes, if you leave it on the radiator to dry, you will be breathing in nasty chemicals. And it will form a film of dried paint on the surface and take a long time to dry. And the cat will spill it all over the place before it does.
I have made up an instruction photo but don’t seem to be able to post it here