Plastics Proliferation

In the original version of the movie Sabrina (1954), businessman Linus Larrabee spends a fancy party showing wealthy guests the wonders of plastics - at one point bouncing up and down on what looks like a sheet of Plexiglas.

From the movie The Graduate (1967), you might recall the line, "There's a great future in plastics!"

Plastics have, indeed, redefined our material lives. Look around you right now: what can you identify that isn't plastic? For me, at the moment, I am sitting at a wooden desk - but my chair, computer, clock, telephone - all are mostly plastic.

Plastics inundate the art world too.

If you look to my earlier blog entry titled "Medium, Pigment, Binder", you will recall that binder - whatever holds the pigment together - is the defining element of a medium. The binder which creates acrylic paint is "polymer resin".

In simpler terms, that means "goopy plastic". Polymer (literally, a chemical compound of repeating structures) refers to plastic, and resin is goo (like pine tree sap, only in this case, synthetically produced).

Now, I am not a chemist, but Sam Golden was. While making oil paints with his uncle Leonard Bocour in post-war New York City, Golden invented what we now call acrylic paint. At first, it was pretty uninspiring stuff - gloppy and hard to control, puddling and drying in unfortunate ways.

But over the past 60 years or so, acrylic paints have come a long way. Today they offer dazzling versatility and variety. They can imitate oil paints or watercolors, and have many unique properties of their own.

Polymer clay is another obvious example of plastic art. More commonly known by the brand names "Sculpey", "Fimo", and "Kato Poly Clay", this is a malleable product which hardens permanently when heated at a low temperature in a home oven. Like acrylic paint, its versatility astounds.

Other plastic-based art products: adhesives, varnishes, palettes, brushes, markers, rubber stamps - and on and on and on. What comes to your mind?

There is much to lament about life in the modern world - environmental degradation, dwindling resources, junk food. BUT: anything which expands our opportunities for positive self-expression can be called good. In that light, plastic is a blessing.