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July/August 2010 Featured Stories
Dirty Art

by Leah Fanning Mebane

My husband and I, along with his visiting parents, are driving up Hwy. 101 from Northern California into Oregon when suddenly I screech, “Stop! Now!”

They all jump and then a second later, remembering my madness, roll their eyes and realize I must have spotted clay soil on the side of the road. My father-in-law reluctantly pulls over and backs up to the beautiful red-orange clay radiating from the road cut.

I hurry to hoist my seven month’s pregnant belly out the car door and lumber up the brushy slope to find the richest specimen, scooping up a few handfuls into a plastic bag. Hustling back to the car, I stash the bag on top of a growing pile of earthen pigment samples that I’ve already collected up and down the coast.

For more than a decade, my medium of choice was traditional oil painting, which uses turpentine and toxic heavy metal-laden paints. Despite my allergic reactions to solvents and paints, as well as my growing guilt over polluting the earth with fumes and toxic waste, I continued to use it, ignorant of any other option.

Then a few years ago when I learned that it was possible to make my own oil paints from earthen clay and oil, my passion was ignited. I realized that my large abstract paintings, already inspired by the earth in their patterns and colors, could also include nature-based pigments, and the whole process could now become even more aligned with my values.

It took quite a bit of investigative Googling to find information on this simple and ancient process. I eventually found an artist in New Mexico who made his own paints and who recommended the one and only out-of-print book written on the subject. I also found several websites about eliminating toxins from the painting process.

It turns out that turpentine is relatively recent in the art world. The old masters of the Renaissance didn’t use it but simply cleaned brushes and mixed pigments with walnut or flax seed (linseed) oil. This same technique has been used since prehistoric times, going back 15,000 years, except the binder used then was urine, blood, sap, grease or honey.

Over the centuries, from the Egyptians and Etruscans to the ancient Buddhists and medieval monks, earthen pigments have been used as the primary paint. Red, orange, yellow, brown, black, white and sometimes green could always be found in the ground, while blues and purples were more elusive. Each culture used a different technique to achieve blues and purples: prehistoric people used manganese ore, the Egyptians used copper frits, the ancient Chinese ground up malachite and azurite, and the Etruscans ground up lapis lazuli stones.

The basic steps I use to make my own paint are simple. I look for primarily clay soils, avoiding sand or soil with lots of organic matter. The places to find the best colors are along road cuts, quarries (that often reveal strata of several different-colored earths), eroded areas, banks of rivers or streams, and construction sites.

After collecting a few handfuls, I dry the soil in the sun, grind it into a fine powder, mix with walnut oil and … voila! The key to a nice paint, I’ve discovered, is grinding it into an extra-fine powder using a kitchen flour sifter, a mortar and pestle, and a fine screen.

The benefits of making our own earthen paints are numerous. The most obvious one is that we’re no longer poisoning the earth or adding to our own body the burden of unnecessary chemicals and outright toxins. Additionally, we’re saving quite a bit of money collecting our own free pigments.

Even better, natural earth pigments are actually far superior to synthetic store-bought paints: they are more permanent (think cave paintings), and they are not affected by sunlight, humidity, temperature or impurities. There is no need for added fillers or stabilizers to increase shelf life, and the colors are more intense due to light bouncing off the irregular surfaces of each pigment particle. Lastly, there are no more off-gassing paintings in my clients’ homes.

But the most wonderful benefit I received was the way this process led me into a deeper connection with our natural world, as I spent more and more time outside the studio directly connecting with the origins of my paints. These organic materials married well with the nature-inspired images on each canvas to evoke an aliveness and interconnectedness — because they are alive and encapsulate the cycle of life within them.

I do not miss the “normal” experience, or I should say disconnect, of buying a tube of paint (shipped from another state or country), and arbitrarily squeezing it out without a sense of its direct relationship to my painting process. Instead I start with a walk down a trail, creek bed or road cut. I breathe the fragrance of the forest air, feel both the stillness and the movement of the branches and birds, and soon spot an interesting color. Digging with bare hands to see if it’s mostly clay, sand or silt, I scoop up a handful and pause to experience its texture and the organisms in and around it … before walking on.

This dirt-foraging brings greater energy and life to my painting experience, slowing me down and shifting me into my right brain where I really see what’s around me rather than quickly labeling it and moving on. That stillness and complexity of nature is what I try to capture back in my studio. The flowing of organically circular shapes that emerges on the canvas seems to echo the elemental shapes of nature, from microscopic cells to exploding nebulae in space.

This blending of my work and nature’s work gives me greater mental and physical freedom to paint, and allows me the joy of doing no harm to the environment and instead to express my art and passion in a partnership with the earth.

Leah Fanning Mebane lives in the Applegate Valley of Southern Oregon with her husband, Drew and newborn baby, Django. She is represented by galleries in Massachusetts, Wyoming and Oregon, and teaches earth painting out of her studio. Visit www.fanningart.com.