House Paint From Here

The paint gets on my hand, drips on the ground …

But that’s OK. It’s mostly stuff from the earth anyways. It will wash out of my clothes. This paint is not plastic.

It is hard to think about plastic because it’s everywhere, in everything. It’s in the keyboard I’m typing on, in the glasses I’m looking through at this screen. I don’t know how to live without it. Steps I take towards using less seem miniscule—to cry in the ocean, as they say. Doing something to resist the habits of our plastic-using society often seems to cause more problems than it solves.

I take heart from Adrienne Maree Brown’s idea that change is fractal. This means that small changes can and do affect larger systems. This makes me hope that things I actually do with my hands and materials will change what I imagine, what I can imagine—and, as I share them, what we can imagine. 

I have been a painter for many years. I have hosted countless workshops for folks of a wide range of ages. I have used a lot of acrylic and latex paint, washed my brushes in countless sinks. Those plastics wind up being part of our water system.

Paint adds considerable microplastics to our environment. In the Yukon River, the paint from road markings makes up a significant amount of the microplastics in the water. I can’t imagine a world where we don’t paint lines on the road (I throw up my hands).

In my despondency, I watch too many Instagram reels. Wandering in those rabbit holes, I came across a recipe for house paint that uses clay, sand, flour and a small amount of borax, which is a laundry booster. If you google it, you’ll find it.

When I was invited to carry out a residency to create an installation at Raven ReCentre, with fish-skin tanning artist Cheryl McLean, I wanted to actually try this paint.

My work with Yukon clay set me up to try this. I had a bucket of clay slurry settling in my backyard. I poured some of it into an old pillowcase and hung it up to strain. I was able to find some sand nearby and sieve it.

I set up my camp stove outside Raven, and Cheryl and I experimented with making non-plastic-based paints and adhesives. I took a cup of Hinterland’s flour and mixed it into two cups of cold water. I added this to six cups of boiling water and cooked over a low heat, stirring constantly, till it thickened. 

I mixed a couple of tablespoons of borax into the sand. I then mixed roughly equal parts of sand, clay and flour paste in a bucket with a drill, using a paint-mixing attachment.

There are many more unpredictable elements at play here than with commercially-engineered paint. I could see that getting a feel for it would take a while. I had to add more water. It’s meant to be thicker than housepaint, but I wasn’t sure how thick. The first strokes didn’t look so good.

I wanted to test it on painted, primed and bare drywall. I had some prepared scraps, about 2×3 feet each. I primed them 2/3 of the way down and painted them with house paint for the top third.

From what I read, I understood that this paint would not be waterproof. Then a dog came by and peed on my test panel when it was just the first coat, and that didn’t bother it. It got me wondering how water resistant it actually was.

First coat was streaky, though once I got the water content dialed I was impressed with how it stuck to the painted surface. Second coat was better. Then, following instructions, I sponged it with water and polished it with a yoghurt-container lid. Plastic, I guess, but they’re everywhere.

The result was a lovely textured beige colour I would never have picked as a paint chip but that gave me a feeling of satisfaction. 

To test its weathering, I painted the far half of the traffic bollards in front of Raven. Check them out if you’re there. It’s hard to see as the colour isn’t far off the concrete and wood themselves. I figure the top is worn off but the sides probably still have paint on them.

I painted halfway across the garden planters that my partner Dean made in our backyard, which was often watered with the sprinkler. The top seems to have worn off, but the side isn’t all that different yet.

I painted the vertical side of our wall tent. I can see some marks from water, but the paint film itself was unchanged a few weeks later.

I painted the underside of the structure that shelters our front door. It was primed first. Two coats, even without burnishing, gives me something very even. The paint shows me the places where water seeps in, but mostly, this paint is sheltered from the rain. My second coat was more watered down because I was running out of paint. I think the action of that coat partly dissolving the coat before is what made it so even.

I added red iron oxide to the paint and painted the walls behind our wood stove. This was just one coat—the pigment is also quite opaque. 

Will it last? Who knows? But our plastics are lasting in our environment longer than we want them to. We don’t know what they are doing there. The clay and sand in this paint have been hanging out in this environment for a long time. When it wears out, they will be at home here. 

I’ll write an update article when I have news of how these paint jobs last … maybe next spring.

If you have ideas for the Material ReCulturing column, please email them to me at materialreculturing@yahoo.com. Let’s keep trying stuff.