Materials Safety

I have been drawing, painting, growing or building something since I was a small child. I am most at home in a messy apron with many projects going at the same time and I have always loved to try out a new skill or media, I am a natural experimenter, letting my materials speak directly to me. During the time I made pottery and created photos using a darkroom I was familiar with safety protocols to minimize toxic exposure to dust and chemicals. I remember print fixative being especially rank and wanting to go outside and breathe plenty of fresh air after time in the dark room.

While taking art classes at my local college I was strongly encouraged to use acrylic paint, mostly because I lived in the very hot and humid Florida gulf coast and oil paint can take ages to dry in that kind of environment. I honestly found acrylic paint unpleasant and worked in pastel and charcoal before getting into pottery. Like many artists I assumed acrylic paint was more safe than oil paint and was a bit surprised when years later while working on a group of abstract paintings on paper using fluid acrylics, I started to get headaches and nausea from the smell of the paint.

I was working a a studio/ corner of my living room in late winter here in Cincinnati, OH with the windows closed, so I did not have adequate ventilation. It was and is ususally too cold here for half the year to keep the windows open. My solution to this delimma was to switch mediums, this time to oil paint with cold wax medium not realizing that OMS, or odorless mineral spirits while much less toxic than turpentine, is still not good to breathe in.

Over the period of about four months I started to feel sick after opening my OMS to clean brushes or to clean up paint. I was very minimal in using OMS too because I just really hated the smell so I never used much of it. I then realized that as my cold wax and oil paintings were drying they were off gasing OMS because cold wax medium is made with beeswax and OMS. So I ended up putting away my oil painting supplies in frustration because I felt was making myself sick and went back to watercolor, a medium I found fun to fool around in but did not feel like I could really make any paintings in the style, mostly abstract, that I was working in and comfortable with.

I know that plenty of artists go solventless, using vegetable oils to clean up and that it is not necessary to clean brushes everytime you paint. Cold wax medium just has a unique velvety matte finish that really inspired me to paint. I am hoping to find a recipe, or to create a cold wax recipe that does not use solvents, if I do make one that I like I will be sure to share it.

As I was going through my acrylic and cold wax pieces recently, I found myself wanting to revisit working in those media but had the same problem as before and decided to do a bit more research on the subject to find out if it was just me, I am extra sensitive to a lot of things, or did other people get headaches and nausea from acrylic and OMS fumes. After perusing the forums at Wet Canvas, several artists blogs and a company called Natural Earth Paint I was really unpleasantly surprised to learn that a lot of people have bad reactions to acrylic paint and OMS fumes, like a lot, a lot.

In fact if you are a professional painter, if you spend hours creating in your studio and work on large pieces it seems like it is only a matter of time before you deal with chemical sensitivities. Learning this and also learning a bit more about what is actually in acrylic paint, this blog post was eye opening and gave me serious pause with what I want to use in my unventilated studio. My family, and my cat breathes in what ever I paint with and yes I have had my family complain about the smell of my paint, another reason I keep going back to watercolor.

After reading more about creating safer art materials over at Natural Earth Paint I decided to order some of their natural plant based acrylic-like paint to try and I am still playing with it. This company avoids certain pigments like cobalts, cadmiums and synthetics so they offer a fairly limited but still very beautiful color palette. Another book I have found helpful is “The Artist’s Complete Health and Safety Guide” by Monica Rosso, which I might review as soon as I finish reading. There are many more books and resources available to help guide artists in proper and safe use of their materials but these are the ones I have been looking into recently.

For now I plan to avoid all conventional acrylic paint and any solvents used in oil paint mediums at least until it warms up enough here to have a window open with a fan on. Have any of you had issues with paint fumes or any chemical sensitivities? I would love to know how you worked around it or if you changed mediums.