Ep.030 The Reality of Eco-Friendly Art

In this myth-busting episode, I discuss what we as artists really need to focus on and what we should understand about our materials and how what we do impacts the earth. Are you making conscious decisions about what you create and what you are comfortable working with in terms of the materials that express what you need to express while still being a responsible caretakers for this beautiful planet of ours? It is not an easy thing to figure out, but I’m going to try to help you understand the scope of the issues so you can zero in on what makes sense for you.

Other Resources mentioned:

https://darntough.com/ (because, yes, I talk socks for a hot minute)

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CREDITS:

Cover design by Sage; Illustration by Olga Kostenko

Music by Playsound

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TRANSCRIPT

(AI transcribed, unedited. Please excuse the copious errors.)

Those are areas where you can make a difference, not by working with materials and tools that don’t allow your full expression. If you’re not doing it with full expression. Isn’t that as wasteful as anything else?

Hello. All my caring, considerate creatives out there. Thank you for joining me on the Sage Arts podcast. This is Sage. It’s just going to be me and you and all of our creative friends out there today. So you’re welcome to come hang out with me in the studio. Strangely enough, the big comfy chair is empty, even though I’ve got three dogs around me and hopefully they won’t get too noisy. We’re pet sitting, so I’ve got our big black German shepherd, Ember, the little white American, Eskimo Kimba. And in addition, we have Penny a brindle bull terrier. So we’ve covered all the colour range of the dogs and none of our clothes are safe from showing dog hair. But there’s too much cute here to be annoyed by that. So come on in. Bring a comfy beverage of choice. I have some hot coffee and I was nibbling on some homemade yet low fat cornbread, so I’m happy and guilt free creative Right now. Here at the 10th Muse Studios, we’re finally enjoying a bright, sunny and warm week for Southern California. I know some people are dealing with more than a little heat in some of the south and central states. I hope we’re almost through that heat wave. It just sounds terrible. There’s also all those huge fires in Canada, and I hope my Canadian listeners, you’re all safe. And those of you in the eastern U.S. who are dealing with all of the smoke. I’ve been watching those reports on the air quality in the smoky skies. I hope you’re being careful and taking care of yourself. And yeah, we’re unfortunately very familiar with those kinds of episodes out here in California. So I feel for you. Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to lately has mentioned some weird weather that they’re dealing with or just recently dealt with. And as we all know, the weird weather we’re having is of course part of the climate change issues that we are all facing. So it’s no surprise that one of the things that we even as artists have to discuss if we want to leave our children and our grandchildren with a livable world and a beautiful earth to enjoy is to ask whether what we do as artists and as human beings, if it’s impacting the environment in any detrimental way. I know a lot of us don’t really want to talk about this because the answers seem like they would be just to like not make art or not make art with the materials that we love to work with. And I’m going to tell you upfront, I am not here to tell you to switch your art materials or to stop making anything. It’s going to be quite the opposite. But I think to be responsible just human beings, not just artists, we need to understand what we’re really dealing with and how what we do can affect negatively or positively the world that we live in. That’s what we’re going to do today. We’re going to talk about what we as artists really need to focus on and what we should understand about our materials and how what we do impacts the earth and make conscious decisions about what we do so that we’re comfortable working with materials that express what we need to express while being responsible caretakers for this beautiful planet of ours. Speaking of caretakers, I want to thank all the people who have been taking care of me and who have been sharing and promoting and talking about the podcast recently. There’s just been a lot of that and I just so appreciate it. Like Nina Martine Robinson and the Longmont Polymer Clay Guild out in my previously adopted state of Colorado. Thank you all for sharing and spreading the news about the Lael McDill podcast in particular. What a great response that got her art is just so joyful, as Paula Gilbert noted. Thank you for that comment, Paula. And particularly big thank you actually to Lael herself, who after taking the time out to do the interview, also showed some seriously generous support through a PayPal donation option that we have here. I guess she hadn’t had the opportunity to listen to the podcast much before, but she was on the road a lot prior to the interview and she listened to a bunch of them and now she’s one dedicated fan. I just love how we can help each other out like that. By the way, if you like Lil’s work, she has a number of shows going on. If you didn’t catch that and fears that she’ll be out, so make sure to check her page at Leo McDowell dot com. And if you’re in the area you got to go see her work in person. It’s just so detailed. There’s just so much going on. It’s hard to get that across in the images online. In any case, do all please keep sharing when you can keep commenting because I love to hear from you. You can get the links to send me feedback or to donate to find these people that I’ve interviewed, whatever it is, by going to the Sage Arts dot com website, you can go to the contact page to reach me. You can go a little ways down the home page to find the buy me a coffee and PayPal donation buttons. If you find the stuff valuable and you want to give back, you can also send me comments on Facebook and Instagram at the Sage Arts podcast pages and for yourself, don’t forget to hit the follow button on your podcast player. So you know when the new episodes are out. And remember, we’re going to start Zoom calls. These Zoom gathers next month. The first one will be on July 9th. It’ll be Sunday in the evening in the United States, like 5 p.m. Pacific Time, which is like 8 p.m. Eastern Time, which puts it between like 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., depending on where you are in Australia on Monday the 10th. I know a lot of Australians voiced an interest in doing this, so I tried to make sure I got a time that, you know, you’d be awake now. You’d have to be a true night owl to join us from Europe, but I’m going to schedule another one probably midweek later in the month. That will be more conducive for European listeners to join. So just hold on for that. If you’re in Europe and you want to come to a chat now to get in on these chats, you will need to either follow the Facebook group page known as the Sage Arts Share space. Just search for that in the Facebook platform and join or be on the newsletter list, which you can get to via the news and notices button on the home page of the Sage Ask.com. I do not share your email with anybody else or use it for anything else. Okay, Business aside, let’s explore this business about being an eco conscious artist. Now, initially what I have to tell you is not going to sound good, but keep listening. And keep in mind that I’m not saying this to discourage you from creating. The thing is, I feel we can only make completely honest decisions when we have a full understanding of what it is that we’re working with. And I can tell you that there is not only like light at the end of the tunnel with this, there is purpose in how we choose to create and actions we can take to happily and responsibly create beauty and inspire and challenge others with our art and our passion. Though first, I understand there’s actually no single art material that has any really significant negative impact on the environment in and of itself. Art materials aren’t the issue. The fact is the materials we demonize in general are not and never have been the core of the issue. It’s the way we live and the issues of convenience that are culprits behind our environmental challenges. It’s kind of like that statement of guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Same goes for plastics and fossil fuels and chemicals and all that stuff. These aren’t themselves damaging the earth. It’s what we are doing with them. And I know that may grate against like every other thing you’ve had drilled into your head, like plastics are evil and chemicals are bad. And trust me, I actually feel the same way. But making that the focus is really the wrong way to go about getting any of our present issues resolved. If you want to really drill down on these issues, the fact is people exist, you know, on this earth impacted and with so many of us here, the detrimental aspects of our impact have become hard for the earth to come back from. So it’s not a matter of finding reusable products or recycling or having a zero carbon footprint. It’s about the way we exist on this planet. And yes, there are a lot of people and that is one of the problems that we’re dealing with. But the general consensus actually is that we’ll see populations decline in the second half of the century. So it’s actually going to kind of start resolving itself. We’re already seeing the rate of population growth slow down. By the way, if you want to advocate for population control, I just find this really interesting. You want to support the education of women, especially in countries where women are undereducated. It seems like a weird thing to say, right? But there is a correlation between education of women and lower birth rates. Because educated women pursue careers, they put off starting families and they rein in the family size so they can manage that and a career. So when you think about it actually does make some sense. Aside from that and aside from the number of us here, we as a species have had a detrimental impact on the earth in some fashion for thousands of years. It’s not just today we permanently alter the land. We drain resources, metals, minerals, woods, plants, animals, all that stuff. We build buildings that last for thousands of years. We dig and carve and build to change the landscape that we live in. And it’s nothing new. Since the advent of tools we’ve been doing this, the issue we’re dealing with now is that the world is not able to recover from the amount of change we are causing at the rate we are going in a way that is sustainable for the planet as we know it today. I personally don’t worry about planet Earth herself. We will choke ourselves out long before will destroy this earth. Life will come back. Life will renew. What we’re really dealing with is how much pain we as human beings are going to go through for the sake of what is primarily right now, convenience. If you look at a house from like the 1940s or the 1950s, they barely have anything in there because they use single tools and single products multiple ways. Plus they got hands on with things. They didn’t have gadgets doing things for them or doing things remotely, so they didn’t have to get up to do it. Now we feel that if we don’t have an easy, convenient way to do a thing, we go out and look for a product that does it for us. If we spent more time looking around and seeing what we already have, that would do the job for us. It’s amazing how much money we would save, not to mention how less wasteful we would be. And back in the day we fixed things and Brett kind of laughs at me because I attempt to fix everything before we replace it. Our dishwasher broke last year, I think it was, and the repairman said we should just buy a new one because it would cost more to fix it than to replace it. Well, I don’t take repairmen at their word, really. And I went and bought a $40 pump between Brett and I after we got it out from under the counter, which took kind of longest time, it only took us 20 minutes to fix the dishwasher. Now, that incident happened to save us a lot of money as well, but I was mostly focused on not putting a three year old dishwasher into a landfill. That’s just crazy for those of you old enough to remember the days when you bought an appliance and you expected to have it for your whole life. A few repairs expected, of course, but now we replace rather than repair. We saw this really cool lamp is another example that someone had put in the trash. So Brett, knowing I figure out why it was there and fix it, we grabbed it and it all it needed was a little the little switch knob. So I bought a switch knob. I think it was like $3, $4, and you just pressed it and that was it. And we had a beautiful working lamp. But this is what people do. It’s not a it’s broke fix it kind of world. It’s a it’s broke. Throw it out and buy a new one kind of world because we say things like it’s not worth it to fix it. Sometimes it’s true because things aren’t always made that well anymore. It’s unfortunate, but I think the fact that we have too many things that break too easily and are cheap to replace helps perpetuate this idea that we should replace and not fix. So we are wasteful in that way. Now we have this attitude not because we’re just idiots or don’t care or whatever, but because we’re sold certain ideas about how we should live and that is done in large part because people are out there looking for ways to make an income. Now, that’s not a bad thing. It’s not about greed, which is often stated to be the core issue with some of these companies and all the cheap gadgets. But really think about it. That’s not it. For the most part, people are just looking for ways to make a living. And because there are so many people on this earth, there needs to be more products in order for there to be more jobs, in order for our population on this earth to be able to feed themselves and live a reasonably safe and happy life. If we drastically reduced our purchasing, there would be far fewer jobs and we literally saw what would happen when the pandemic hit and we were all closed off for a while. It financially crushed businesses and families. So saying the problem is overconsumption doesn’t answer the core problem, which is we need a way for people to make a living and feed themselves and their families. That doesn’t contribute to our detriment or impact on the environment. As you see, this is all just not a simple problem and it doesn’t have a simple solution. So what does all this have to do with art? Right. Well, considering how big and complex the whole issue of climate change and environmental protection is, how much do you think the creation of art actually impacts these things? In the big scheme, what we as artists do is really minuscule, and I want to put that kind of out front first, because I think a lot of us feel guilty for working in materials that are not biodegradable or recycled or compostable or sustainable or whatever term that we want to put to it. The fact is there is no zero impact artist material to start with, literally. And I know you’re probably in your head trying to think of some things right now that would be and go ahead, make a list in your head, because I will tell you in just a little bit why many of those things on that list are not actually no impact. It doesn’t matter if it’s just arranging stones on a beach to make art or making all your own paints out of natural materials or only sculpting with found wood. None of those, no matter how good they sound, are without their impact on the environment. Some people would say, Well, you could create with nothing but recycled materials. The difficulty with that is you narrow down the breadth of your expression because the recycled materials is almost certainly going to become part of the art and the message, whether you want it to or not. And if you want to express something unrelated, it can be drowned out by it. I’ve worked in recycled paper, leftover construction materials like stone in Thailand wood But because it’s basically leftover raw materials, it’s often not recognized as recycled or upcycled or whatever. So it’s not primary to what my work says. But if I had a conversation about it or if I listed the materials to include words like found or recycled, I would see a change in the perception of what the work was saying. Plus, like this video I saw the other day by an artists who build their work as sustainable art, and they made art from junk and it was really pretty cool stuff, but they were all painted with acrylic and glued with chemical glues. So is it really sustainable, at least in the way that they were trying to sell it? Maybe. But it’s not without its impact. Do the plastic paint and the chemicals, is the impact reduced? Are they keeping junk out of landfills? Yeah, they are. But it’s not zero impact art. And so it being sustainable is actually kind of in question. And note, as I talk about the stuff, I do work in polymer clay and acrylic paint along with stone and fiber and found objects and that kind of thing. So I’m not putting those materials down. But this is a societal view, right? That plastics and chemicals are bad and as a tool of environmental destruction, yeah, they can be. But the amount used in art, well, it’s not really the problem, is it? There is a kind of movement out there to attempt to be low impact by using natural materials like ceramics are often touted as environmentally friendly because they’re earth sourced. But the amount of energy used to fire the two or three times it takes to complete a piece is tremendous. And many of the glazes are also toxic. So ceramics are not without their issues. Honestly, I think fiber has about the lowest impact of crafts that I can figure. If using all natural sources like you have options to use minimally processed wool and silk and grasses and Russian reeds. But once you get into dyeing them or sealing that dye, you’re often dealing with questionable toxic materials and things that don’t break down. There are also ways to dye fibers with natural pigments and dyes, and that’s, you know, a legitimate way to go. But they have their limitations in color fastness and some still have toxicity issues. And again, creating with all natural materials could change the perception of the message or impact of the work. So there has to be accounted for as well. Not only that, the use of those resources actually removes it from the environmental cycle of the natural world that they were brought from to the point that some materials being stripped off of the land to package and sell to us artists actually destroys the fragile balance of the area and leads to decimated landscapes. Even if this stuff is not being brought in by companies, it’s not being mass produced and packaged for us. There are still problems with harvesting from natural sources, even if we do it ourselves. A few years back I got a request to join in on a conversation online in which people were trying to push natural art materials as the only responsible way to create art. I talked about this before in conferences and magazine articles and on my blog, and someone recalled this, or I’d read something I’d written and asked that I present my case to these people. So I posted my stance about no material is free from environmental impact. And one participant responded that we could just go pick up dead branches and wood in the forest because it was just going to rot there anyways and so it would have no impact. Now, this is what people think about natural materials often, but it’s not true whenever you go out into nature, whenever you take things from the natural world, when you alter the landscape in any way, and that includes picking up dead wood and moving rocks, you’re changing the ecosystem of that place. If a lot of people are doing this like these people are trying to convince other people that this is what they need to do. So this started being a thing. If this is a fad and people were out there picking up dead wood to make art or to make whatever they would be removing an entire layer of an ecosystem, a food source for probably hundreds of thousands of insects and microorganisms. And once you do that, you’ve removed a rung out of the ladder of that ecosystem that fall in wood, which is broken down by those insects in those microorganisms, feeds the soil, which allows certain plants and trees to grow and thrive in a complete, balanced way. When the nutrients are not there, certain plants won’t grow, certain trees will not thrive, and then invasive species or species that were kept in check because of the healthy plants and trees that may have like seed reduced access to light or whatnot, those things will take over. And those other plants could eventually destroy the area by leeching the nutrients out of the soil To the extent that they reduce the opportunity for diversity in the plants, that could re-establish balance and so that eventually could eliminate the resources even needed for those out of control and invasive plants. And soon enough, it could literally turn the whole area into barren land. There’s been a tremendous amount of research in the last few decades about the importance of what’s known as the duff, the decaying matter under trees in woods and forested areas. That stuff seems like waste material to us, but it’s part of a cycle in the ecosystem that has been worked out and tuned to a balance that can be disturbed by anything that we do that dramatically changes it. It’s even true when it comes to this whole thing with people arranging rocks or building carriers. I’m sure you’ve seen that people got some, you know, interesting cool place and they build a car and take a picture and put it on Instagram so they can prove that they were there and that they built this cool thing. Well, when we do that, we disturb the ecosystem just by moving the rocks. The randomly piled rocks may be and often are housing numerous small creatures from insects to reptiles, even small mammals, but especially the larval stages of insects as well as micro-organisms. And these things are food for the creatures higher up on the food ladder. So we get in there, we move them into an unnatural, exposed form and patterns, and we make this cool art. But those creatures end up dying from a lack of shelter because they’re not piled as needed or a lack of food because their food source died from that lack of shelter. And again, we potentially decimate a wrong on that ecosystems ladder. So can you live on this earth and have no detrimental impact? That’s kind of what we’re getting to in this conversation. The hard truth is no, you can’t. But just like when you get a cut of a bruise, if you leave it alone, it will heal, right? You can even get hurt over and over as long as it’s not too much all at once. And you get some time to heal in between. Those ecosystems are the same way. A little impact is okay. Even a little damage is normal. I mean, damage demise and renewal is actually normal and even necessary. Part of the cycles of every living thing and even the earth itself. Renewal brings change and resets balance and often brings better defenses or new processes into place, just like us as people we grow the most and become better only through change and usually precipitated by some kind of damage. Right? So if we are going to cause some damage, what kind and how much is the pertinent question or one of them? Really? The other important question I think, is whether what we do is worth the impact it has on the environment. We ourselves go out and get damaged, sometimes on purpose, and often we still think it’s worth it, right? Like I bruise my knee the other day, fixing a pipe for the water falls on our fish pond. It wasn’t fun. It’s true. But was it worth it? Heck yeah. Now my fish have these falls which aerate the water and they need that oxygen, as do the plants in there that they nibble on. And those plants grow off nutrients from the fish waste and give a home to the bacteria that breaks down all the dead matter that falls in and that dead matter houses, dragonfly nymphs and fly eggs and tiny snails, which the fish in turn eat. And the whole thing is this beautiful, unending cycle. I have to tell you, I love my pond. I think I’ll try to post some stuff on Instagram about it because it’s starting to come alive Now that we’re into some weather that actually feels like the pond plants can come out. It’s a natural bog filter system, so it balances itself. We don’t use any chemicals, you don’t have any filters. Just occasionally we clean up the buildup. Since it’s an enclosed pond, it doesn’t go downstream anywhere. But it’s just amazing what nature will do if you leave it to do its own thing as much as possible. But I digress. As I was saying, you take a certain amount of damage for the things that matter because you know you’ll heal. We can look at how we impact the earth the same way. But since the Earth is pretty sick right now, the question is can she take much more damage? Knowing that from that perspective, should we be aiming to use only the less detrimental art materials? Well, the fact is, no matter what you do in visual arts, you’re going to be using materials and tools that are manufactured and use up resources with most employing or containing some kind of chemical, plastic, fossil fuels, whatever, at some point in production or delivery or the actual product itself. Some people suggest that we can take our art digital, get away from all that. And definitely you can see the reduction in materials being used in digital art. However, the carbon footprint of digital art, especially things that are high power processing like Nfts, which are the worst air and some types of multimedia, these are an ever increasing point of concern because they are so energy heavy. And that is not to mention the electronics you have to keep upgrading that have to be carefully disposed of due to chemicals and heavy metals used in producing these computers and tablets and phones and everything. That stuff isn’t free from impact either, and people are creating more natural and healthier alternatives for some of our art supplies. It’s pretty cool, right? And I’m all for this. But these alternatives still have an impact. If you read some of the articles or watch some of the videos about the subject, you’ll see a lot of caveats. For instance, one guy was talking about watercolor made with honey as a binder. So as a natural binder. But then he noted how honey was also a resource we need to be careful with because of the drop in bee population. So it wasn’t all clean and clear for that particular alternative either. Discussions do vary about natural alternatives such as natural gesso and plant based acrylic mediums are natural pigments you use to make your own paints. Natural dyes for fiber arts and bamboo or recycled paper. This all inevitably comes down to conversations about durability and color fastness and other concerns that don’t bode well for the arts longevity. So you would have to make a judgment call. You can work with eco friendly, easily compostable, biodegradable art materials, but you may end up with more waste. Or you can create something that is durable but is manufactured in ways that may be detrimental to the environment or the local ecology due to toxic processes of producing it. I’m actually not sure that the waste issue is the best point of arguing for the more durable items. Truthfully, since I don’t think that will significantly change the rate or amount that we create. But it can’t affect the value of your work, which could require lower pricing if you’re using less durable items, which could force you to make more in order to make enough money. I don’t know. What I do know is that this is far more complicated than just asking if your material is eco friendly. Right. And that’s the point. So to be as minimally detrimental to the environment as possible, you’d really honestly just need to give up visual arts. But what would your life be without the creation of art? I personally think that creating is one of the most essential elements of a human life, and that’s not some bias on my part or some silly exalting of our craft. I do truly believe that creative work is up there with the need for shelter and security. It’s not our thumbs that make us different than animals. It’s creativity. The happiest people I know, the most fulfilled people I know, the kindest people I know all have some creative outlet, a mode of expressing themselves, a dry move to create something that didn’t exist before, often with a need to share it and make other people’s lives better through it. Without creativity, how few avenues would we have left to release stress and commune with our world and communicate to each other our visions and our dreams? I just don’t think that choosing not to create is any kind of answer to resolving even the smallest issue of environmental concern. And besides, you can influence how others treat the environment through the impact of your artistic message if you choose to. If that is important to you and part of your artistic vision. So I think it’s not whether we create as environmentally conscious artists, but that we live as environmentally conscious and low impact human beings to the best of our ability while still having a meaningful and kind existence. If we focus on how much we use, as well as knowing the difference between the things that are necessary and what is lazy convenience, if we are actually going to make a difference. This is where I believe we should concentrate our concerns and effort. That said, there are ways to be a less detrimental artist, environmentally speaking, and that’s just one area in your life that you can address. I’m going to run through some ideas that you can adopt or not that could help you with the impact you have on this earth through your studio space and your creative process. So for one, use up your scraps. You know, you don’t need to throw away all your bits and pieces that didn’t work into your piece or that get cut off as something or that are left over. If you haven’t already Cultivate a set of techniques and skills for using scrap materials. There’s tons of ideas online, so just go into your search engine or Pinterest boards or whatever and put in your medium or form and using scrap or recycled scrap or whatnot. Likewise, don’t throw out damaged arts or prints. Sell them at a discount. At the very least, give them away. You can upcycle them into something else, which is actually my favorite avenue to take because you can paint over prints or draw on them and just kind of make them one of a kind pieces which makes them really valuable and unique for the people who are buying them nicked or frayed or whatever crafts. If they’re damaged, they can usually be broken down to some extent and reworked, or you can add to the damaged sections and create something new and unique. I mean, you’re creative. Challenge yourself to find ways to renew or upcycle any of your damaged work. And also and this is super important, take care of your tools, clean, dry, calibrated tools that are stored correctly. If they’re kept in good condition, it reduces waste by limiting how much you have to replace, for instance, leaving paint brushes in water, which breaks down the glue in the ferals. That’s not eco friendly because you lose all the bristles and that’s no good. You throw them out, have to buy something else, not immediately removing mediums from your tools. They can cause rust or ruin edges or can build up until the tool isn’t usable. That’s problematic. Keeping machines clean and oiled and stored in dry conditions or whatever they require is another way to be kind to Mother Earth by reducing waste and in some cases reducing energy being that many electrical items are more efficient when cared for and used as intended. And then I think all of us use a fair amount of clean up material. So if you don’t already switch to cloth rags from old T-shirts and bedsheets instead of paper towels or even worse, and I’m sorry about this one, but I have such a soap box for this baby wipes and Clorox wipes. They’re really like the worst. And I apologize if that’s something they use, but I mean, they come in these big plastic tubs, not to mention there’s chemicals in there. And yeah, even the baby wipes have chemicals. You don’t want to be exposed to a lot of just look it up. It’s crazy. But the fact are these wipes are often polyester or polyester blends, so they don’t biodegrade readily. And besides, they’re mostly water. So why pay for non-biodegradable towels and water in a plastic container instead? Make a mix of water and alcohol or water and vinegar and maybe add a little orange essential oil. It’ll give it a little extra cleaning power and a nice scent. Put those in a spray bottle. You can reuse a spray bottle from something else, or I like to buy the glass ones with a good quality sprayers. I have some that I’ve had for years. Those are nice and you can use that for cleaning your surfaces and cleaning your tools. And then you use the old rags, wipe things down, and you just throw them in the washer and that’s it. It’s not that hard. It’s one of those things where I’m talking about where you have those kind of like slivers of convenience that really aren’t that convenient but are kind of wasteful. Right. Again, apologies to any of you baby wipes users out there. But I really, really want to encourage you to try something else. Also, if you use paper towels, because some stuff is really messy and it would just kill the rags and you wouldn’t have a chance to reuse them. Try cutting out those newspapers that you get dropped in your driveway even though you don’t ask for them, or the paper packaging that come in the deliveries that you get if you wipe up the worse of your splatters and messes with these, you might be able to use rakes to finish up and wash those. And I know someone’s probably out there thinking, you know, washing rags uses energy and water, but you know what? So does the production of paper towels. So that’s literally a wash. No pun intended. Sorry about that. Another money saver, as well as environmentally responsible move is to replace disposable tools with durable ones like cheap metal spoons even you can use instead of plastic ones. If you use a lot of plastic spoons in your studio glass pallets instead of disposable paper for paint, stainless steel needle tools instead of toothpicks, you know, you get the picture. These tools are sometimes, but not always more expensive, but just think you won’t replace them as often if ever. I mean, I literally have a bunch of palette knives and carving tools from college, even a few paint brushes, the ones I spent the big bucks on. So that’s not really surprising. But I’ve had them for decades and they’re still in great shape because I just take care of them, put the money out for quality tools and you won’t have to replace them. Like, for instance, I know socks aren’t art material, but it’s what came to mind. We buy both Brett and I buy this brand called Darn Tuff, and they’re like 20 to $25 a pair for these socks, right? But they’re guaranteed for lifetime. And I have some that are like ten years old and I wear them. This, this particular pair is like one my favorite pair that I got ten years ago and I wear them almost every week, ten years of wearing these socks and everyone knows the darn tough people and they want to sponsor this podcast. I will totally talk about their socks like every week. I love them. They’re great socks. But in any case, I have kind of big feet and I used to wear out socks a lot because they kind of stretch more than maybe other people would have. But I was buying socks like every six months or 12 months or something. So if I’d kept up with that and let’s say they were like $5 a pair, I would have spent something like between 50 and hundred dollars on replacing like the one pair I bought ten years ago for $20. So definitely saves me money. And I just think about all those socks. That’s a lot of socks in the landfill and think about your tools, the ones that you are constantly throwing away. That’s a lot of stuff in the landfill as well. So just keep in mind, quality does reduce waste and save money. Quality is worth it. Another thing to consider buy digital versions of books and magazines that you’ll likely only read once or you don’t imagine you’ll hold onto, and this will save you space in your studio as well as money and save paper along with it. And then another option use minimal or recycled product packaging. When you ship work, you can find all kinds of online tutorials for creating easy boxes and snappy envelopes and nicely packaged your work with recycled paper. Of course, minimizing your package to just what’s necessary is probably the best way to go. But recycled or biodegradable materials are the next best way to go, like recycled envelopes and biodegradable bags. And yes, I know that biodegradable and compostable bags don’t necessarily break down very quickly. They have to be in a particular ideal situation in order for that to happen. But they do break down quicker than standard plastics. And what remains after the break down is organic matter and not microplastic. And also stamps instead of stickers. If you brand your packaging or shipping cartons, you can get custom made rubber stamps from all kinds of places online and really the far less expensive than stamps in the long run because you just buy it once and you use it for forever. Really also use recycled shipping materials from the packages that you receive. If you’re not a big online shopper or you ship too much to rely on what’s coming through your door, you can also ask friends and family and neighbors if they’d save theirs and collect from them. I’m sure you’ll have to supplement with some purchase supplies, but this will reduce your consumption as well as your packaging costs. Now, all this stuff is somewhat common sense, but it takes you a moment to come up with them because we have been sold so many things over so many years, sometimes our lifetime, that we think are necessary. But you can just stop and ask yourself if everything that you used as disposable is actually necessary. Like, I think it’s a kind of telling question to ask if these things that we use were necessary 70 or 100 years ago. If not, I bet there was a pretty simple way of doing without them like liners for trash cans, for instance, they didn’t have plastic liners for trash cans until the 1950s. How do you think they handled their trash cans before then? Well, they dumped out their trash and they cleaned out their trash cans. That’s it. In our house. That’s what we do. I haven’t used trashcan liners. I don’t know, maybe it’s been 30 years or something. We just spray out the bins with water and vinegar and wiped it out with a rag. And you have to do this a lot of time anyway, as you might have noticed, because the bags leak all the time. It’s obviously not that necessary to have plastic trashcan liners. You don’t really realize a lot of the times what is actually necessary until you try to live without it and then you’ll see a lot of things are just just silly in my opinion, but you can see for yourself. So anyways, all these ideas are results of really just questioning and looking around and you can do this by spending time asking about the disposable items that you use, asking about the necessity of maybe like certain tools and materials that maybe they’re more fun gadgets than essential items. You know, look in your trash can and ask yourself of the things that are in there, what could have been replaced with something reusable or by doing something that was maybe just slightly less convenient, but really not going to put you out. These ideas, which kind of talked about in terms of studio, they extend far beyond your studio space, of course, reusing rather than disposing, saying no to those slivers of extra convenience that produce more waste and reducing your consumption. And yeah, I know I said our consumerism was kind of necessary to support all the people in this world. But remember, the point was that this was complicated and we need to find solutions to feed everyone while reducing their impact, especially our consumption and reducing the demand for the unnecessary things will actually force people and companies to look for other ways and alternative solutions to this problem. So those are areas where you can make a difference as an individual, not by restricting your creating of art or working with materials and tools that don’t allow your full expression. Because if you’re not doing what you need and want in your artwork, you probably aren’t enjoying it as much. You aren’t growing as well as you could be, and you’re not adding to the beauty and the are of this world. The best way you can. And if you’re not doing it with full expression and as well as you can, isn’t that as wasteful as anything else? Now? You know, probably a bit more than you did about the bigger picture issue behind our ecological responsibility as artists and what the issues really are? There’s no simple answer to this stuff, but the materials we use are only a small part of the issue, no matter how you look at it. At the end of the day, I can’t tell you what is right for you, but I give you all this information and you personally decide if working with your particular materials and maybe the detrimental impact they could have, however tiny. If that sits well with you or not. For some people, no amount of plastic based material is okay. For others, high energy use art forms are just too costly a reality to work with. Our relationship with these issues is just another factor in what we choose to do. Just like the space we have may limit us, or the things we want to say may dictate our art form. As artists, we can truly do our part to create in a low impact a responsible way of creating and living. Just keep in mind that it is not the material we work with, but how we work and how we live that will make the difference in the health of this planet and ourselves. There is a lot that you can do to contribute to a safe, sustainable and beautiful world. And I, for one, think making art will always be one of them. I know not all of you will agree with everything I’ve said, and some of you may have questions still. And I’ll tell you, I would love to hear your side and I would love to see those questions. So please do reach out to me through the website at the stage Art scheme. Just go to the contact page as usual. You can reach me there. You can also go to Instagram or Facebook and go to the Sage Arts podcast as a name for those pages on those platforms and leave me comments in the posts or send me messages through them. And remember plan on joining that Zoom chat on July 9th. Just sign up for that newsletter on the home page of the Sage Arts for the News and Notices button that will get you there or join the Sage Arts Share Space Group on Facebook to have access to that link. I’ll send those out the morning at the ninth at the latest, so get yourself up to have that when needed. And if you enjoy this podcast, if it feeds your muse and you want to give back, find the Buy Me a coffee and PayPal donation buttons a little ways down the home page of the Sage ask.com, you can also find links in the show notes in your podcast player or the page you’re listening to in your browser. Everything I’ve mentioned all of these links are in the show notes, so you can go there for all the information that you need. And don’t forget to hit the follow button on your podcast player and share anything that I put out there with your other fellow creatives so they can find us and join the conversation as well. So with that, we hopefully put much on you. But with that, I’m going to leave you for now and next week we’re going to start the July design conversation. I think we’re going to start with the element of marks which are not a design element that’s often talked about, but it’s really one of the really fun ones to explore. So that’s something to look forward to. In the meantime, kindly and consciously create to your heart’s content. Keep feeding that muse, especially with new and novel and maybe earth friendly new experiences. Stay true to your particular wonderful brand of weirdness and I’ll catch you here next time on the Sage Arts podcast.