On a train ride with an old friend last year I asked whether she preferred sunrises or sunsets. Her answer was sunrises, of course, because sunsets are much too sad; they look like the world is ending. I understood what she meant, though my perspective differs from hers. I marvel at the sun as it alights on the horizon, and revel in the crisp air washing across my skin the very second it disappears.
Tadgh Bentley’s sunset study suspends the sun over a wine-dark sea. Throughout the composition he uses an oil paint named Iron Violet: straight out of the tube the colour is an earthy, soulful plum; mixed with white or grey or black, it transforms into an undertone characterized by its subtle magnetism. Iron Violet has a certain allure that defies description—perhaps a form of residual energy from the process that led to its creation. “I believe that inside the material there is an astonishment related to an idea of life,” says Giuseppe Penone. “This life is in the material and also in the work of art.”
Iron Violet was born out of a multi-year experiment between John Sabraw, artist and professor of fine arts at Ohio University, and Guy Riefler, fellow professor of civil and environmental engineering with expertise in acid mine drainage. The two met by chance over a common interest in converting iron oxide into viable pigment, from which the name Iron Violet derives. 6000 pounds of this raw material is dumped daily into Sunday Creek near Millfield, Ohio due to ongoing seepage from a coal mine abandoned multiple decades ago.
Pyrite—a leftover byproduct of coal mining activities—reacts with water and oxygen to create runoff saturated with iron oxide and sulfuric acid. The former compound infiltrates surrounding waterways and renders them all bright orange, while the latter lowers the water’s pH to a point where aquatic life cannot survive the acidity. “You can still run into children who [when] you tell them to draw a stream, they reach for an orange crayon,” Riefler notes.
Through his lens as an environmental engineer, iron oxide is a stubborn pollutant and an intergenerational issue worth tackling. Through the lens of an artist like Sabraw, however, iron oxide is also a means of communication: “I think oftentimes the way that we communicate about these problems, how we might be trying to solve them, all these complexities that are involved with it… I understood early on that what might draw people is to do away with all of that, and have their initial invitation come in through beauty, and through colour, and through art.”
For now, harvesting iron oxide remains a manual community effort. Volunteers step into the waters of Sunday Creek to remove buckets upon buckets of heavy orange sludge which are filtered through a sieve on-site, processed at the university’s lab, and dried to a powder consistency before being sent to a kiln. Firing the iron oxide at a temperature above 500 degrees Celsius converts its typical colour into a rare and vivid violet. Specialists at Gamblin Artists Colors, a paint manufacturer based in Portland, Oregon, then mix the lightfast pigment with flax oil and zinc to produce the finished paint product.
The more artists use Iron Violet, the higher the demand for the pigment. Proceeds currently help fund the construction of a large-scale water treatment and pigment production plant at the Truetown Discharge site in Millfield. Once the facility is fully functional, 100% of the runoff will be purified at the source: wildlife will return, new jobs will be created, and collecting iron oxide sludge by hand will no longer be necessary. “We’ve been able to build a project that sits squarely at the confluence of engineering, art, social enterprise, and watershed restoration,” writes Michelle Shively MacIver, Director of Product Development at True Pigments. “The more we succeed, the cleaner our streams become.”
Turning pollution into paint echoes the natural history of bearded vultures. Sharing in the spirit of the Sunday Creek volunteers, these birds of prey wade into iron oxide-rich waters high in the mountains to tint their white plumage in the orange mud. This seems to be an inborn behaviour, with no definitive hypothesis as to why it is performed other than for cosmetic reasons. If rufous feathers are an aesthetic inclination, then bearded vultures may well be artists at heart.
They also happen to be an exceptional clean-up crew. Feeding on bones is their specialty: the gastric juices of bearded vultures are acidic enough to kill most pathogens during digestion which helps to mitigate the spread of disease among injured, dying, or dead animals on land. While remediating acid mine drainage is the exact inverse—raising pH levels to bring aquatic life back to Sunday Creek—both processes create sustenance out of unwanted remains. Reclaiming iron oxide from the contaminated environment turns this residue of a fallen industry into a nourishing marrow instead.
According to a Lenni Lenape myth, the sun once drew too close to the earth and threatened to scorch everything with its immense heat. The only creature who managed to push the sun back into the sky was a noble turkey vulture. He was badly burned from the ordeal, a sight which frightened and deterred other animals. And so the vulture became a bird of solitude, treated with equal parts reverence and revulsion.
To be in service of life itself whether lauded or ostracized: this too describes the labour of artists. Time and time again they breach the obvious to reveal what more there is to the human spirit. “Society must accept some things as real,” James Baldwin explains, “but [the artist] must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen.”
Following cold nights, turkey vultures perch with wings outstretched to bathe in the early morning light. I am reminded of my friend’s love of sunrises, and how the very thing that sustains us is simultaneously too intense to behold. We cannot bear to look at the sun; it is achingly beautiful when we catch a glimpse. A painter expresses this feeling on our behalf and evinces the warmth with violet.