Back to Nature

Organic dyes and handmade paper make painter’s artwork all-natural

By Lisa Aurand

Elena Osterwalder has dedicated her life to color.

Color was with her in the landscape of Mexico, where she was born, and followed her to central Ohio as she studied at the Columbus College of Art and Design. For 30 years, she put brush to canvas, learning the transparency of oil paints and how layering them affects color.

Finally, a bout with breast cancer gave Osterwalder a change in medium.

“I decided it was better not to be working anymore with (carcinogenic) paints,” Osterwalder says. “I was using all the cadmiums … so I thought about it and I decided to go with totally organic colors.”

Bottom Right: City Scene

In pursuit of more natural alternative to the dangerous cadmium, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers a probable human carcinogen, Osterwalder turned back to nature and her Mexican roots. Dried cochineal, parasitic beetles that live on cacti, have been used for centuries to create a vibrant red color. The Spanish made more money from cochineal than they did from Mexico’s gold and silver, Osterwalder says.

She learned of cochineal on a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, where she visited an art paper workshop and saw handmade paper dyed with natural colors.

In the garage of her Upper Arlington home, the 70-year-old artist crushes the tiny cochineal insects with a coffee grinder, mixes them with a little lime juice and distilled water, and lets the pigment marinate for a few days in a glass jar. The dye darkens as it ages, deepening to almost black after five days. When she’s ready to use it, Osterwalder will boil the dye for 15 minutes, finishing the process.

Once cooled, the dye is poured into a shallow plastic bin, where pieces of handmade Amate paper soak in the rich color. The mulberry bark paper is made by Mexican artisans, using the same processes that have been used for hundreds of years. No two batches of dye are ever the same, and no two pieces of paper ever soak up color the same way, Osterwalder says. It’s an exercise in letting go.

“Because it’s natural and what is being dyed is also natural, you will never get two colors the same,” she says. “There is no way on earth because everything absorbs in a different way. The colors are just stunning.”

She also uses turmeric to create yellows and oranges, indigo for deep blues, and Campeche wood to create blacks and navy blues.

After the paper is dyed, it dries between two sheets of waxed paper. Then Osterwalder might stack it with other sheets, pull it apart or crumple it.

Some pieces end up mounted in frames behind glass. Others – like the 475-piece installation displayed at the Rhodes Tower in 2007 – are laid out on the floor, side by side. That project was funded by a grant from the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture.

One finished installation in Osterwalder’s garage consists of bundles of crumpled, woven paper hung from thick, dyed hemp rope.

These pieces are about the destruction of handmade goods and the modern preference for . machine-made items.

“I feel bad that these natural things are . disappearing,” Osterwalder says.

Some have looked at her work, Osterwalder says, and asked, “What’s so special about a dyed piece of paper?”

The answer is in her 40 years of artwork, which can be seen online at www. elenaosterwalder.com or in a retrospective at Art Access Gallery in Bexley from March 2-April 19.

“I get very mad when people come in and they tell me ‘Oh, this is just a dyed piece of paper,’ ” Osterwalder says. “No, it is not just a dyed piece of paper, I am sorry to tell you. It has a lot of history, a lot of work and a lot of experience that went in behind it before I produce this dyed piece of paper. It’s not only the historical part of the paper and the spiritual meaning that make it, but it’s also the fact that I went through 40 years of painting in order to come to say, ‘This is a

Her work is currently on display in galleries in Switzerland, Israel and Korea, but is rarely displayed in the U.S. other than at Art Access, which has represented Osterwalder for the last

“It’s been very well accepted in

Europe because they tend to be more ecologically minded than the United States,” Osterwalder says.

Whether or not her work receives critical acclaim in America, Osterwalder continues to come to her garage studio and “talk” to her art, moving the scraps of paper until they are arranged just the right way, and encouraging her six grandchildren to notice the colors in nature. cs