Painting with an Environmental Palette

John Dahlsen

I am a contemporary environmental artist, author and university art educator whose work examines the passage of time in landscape and the place of humankind within it. I work with found objects, primarily plastic ocean litter, to create semiabstract compositions. My work is multi-disciplinary and includes assemblage, sculpture, installation, painting and printmaking.
Over twenty years ago, dating back to 1998 and 1999, I made my first assemblage work titled “Contemporary Landscapes” from beach-found plastics. I used recycled materials to convey the history and memory of a place, to comment on the human experience of place and the beauty and degradation of the environment. And as I evolved as an artist, these elements have deepened and become more sophisticated through both my studio based work and my own research as a practicing visual environmental artist.
I am based in Byron Bay, Australia where I have lived for close to thirty years. I was originally born in Sydney, Australia and spent my childhood growing up in East Gippsland in Victoria, Australia. After moving to Byron Bay in the early nineties. I lived in a beautiful home that had lime-washed ceilings and walls. This fascinated me because it reminded me of the driftwood that I used to collect and work with when I was in art school at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. I thought at the time: ‘I want to go back and collect driftwood from those remote beaches of Southern New South Wales and Eastern Victoria’.
When I eventually went back to collect that driftwood, I noticed plastics washing up on shore. They weren’t there fifteen years prior, and I became fascinated. Suddenly, I felt that I had this enormous meaning that I could express in my art. A social and environmental conscience existed alongside a commitment to create objects of beauty. I put my brushes down and didn’t paint again for close to fifteen years. Living in Byron Bay made access to beaches easy and was the perfect location to engage in this activist focused work.

My artistic process includes mixing micro plastics with ecologically sustainable plant based, clear resin. I paint the plastics onto stretched Belgian linen into abstract details or the shape of the Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean. It’s a meeting of my past painting and my current assemblage work. I love the aesthetics of it. I love the fact that this work is quite literally contemporary in the sense that it represents the small pieces of plastic I pick up on the beach every day.
Although these plastics are generally seen as ugly or as trash when littering the shores of the world’s beaches, I see something different. I see the potential for art. The potential to inspire. I see the potential possibility of renewal through art.
There’s always the possibility of turning a negative into a positive. Just like collecting rubbish on beaches, you can do something positive, and it can be beautiful as well. If that message gets across through my artwork, it can only be a
good thing. In truth, I see something unique in all the plastics that I collect and include in my art. Therefore, I don’t necessarily dislike these plastics.

Plastic Garbage on my Studio Floor

My foray into making environmentally based art was entirely accidental. I was collecting driftwood from very remote beaches in East Gippsland in Australia to make furniture for our new home in Byron Bay, and I stumbled across huge amounts of plastic debris. I felt compelled to collect it, intending to take it to the local dump for recycling. The more plastic I collected, the more intrigued I became. I then shipped sixty to eighty jumbo garbage bags back to Byron Bay and left it on the side of my studio while I made driftwood furniture. When I poured it onto the floor, the colours, the forms, amazed me. I was on fire with the possibilities of what I had discovered.
I tipped the plastic garbage onto my studio floor. Before my eyes, a potential palette appeared. I put the reds in one corner, the blues in the other corner, the pinks in another, and so on. Many artistic ideas started to emerge, including how to work with a challenging medium and its inherent activist and environmental overtones.
Exhibitions over the years have provided a resource and a platform for me to create and become aware of environmental problems. I am able to use these exhibition opportunities to reveal how I have actively harvested from ‘nature’ the far removed products of human manufacture: the raw material extracted from the earth, processed into commodity, used, discarded, and returned by the tide to human use.
My exhibits not only transform rubbish into objects of value, but they also raise questions about cultural worth. They compel the viewer to make links between the cycles of production and use of everyday functional objects. What distinguishes a piece of plastic ground to crystal-like translucency by time and water, from a work of art? Can my exhibits shift our thinking on matters of sustainability, or is it complicit in the exploitation of the earth’s resources for human consumption?

Art is a way of sharing my messages with a broad audience. I feel that even if just a fraction of the viewing audience were to experience a shift in their awareness and consciousness about the environment and art, then it’s worth it. I believe that humanity is at a critical point in time, with our planet currently existing in a fragile ecological state, with global warming hastening unheard-of changes, all amplifying the fact that we need all the help we can get.
We have a long way to go to get the big businesses and governments of this world to treat the current environmental concerns with the imperatives that they deserve. The re-education of our species is beginning to happen and change is afoot; however, action will only take place when it becomes economically viable. I believe that this shift is inevitable. But in the meantime, it is up to each individual to bring about change and become more conscious.
I ask that individuals be as conscious as possible. This begins with the simplest things, like people being kind to themselves, being kind to others and being kind to our beautiful planet. How could people dispose of waste in a careless manner if they are being conscious? Making this art is a way of sharing my messages about the need to care for our environment and to appreciate art.

Giving Form to my Path

My Ph.D. dissertation was entitled Environmental Art: Aesthetics, Activism, and Transformation. Aesthetics is all about beauty. Activism is about making a statement about the environment. And Transformation is that which becomes possible when people allow themselves to enter into the work, to go beyond.

Figure 5. Dahlsen J. (2019) Interior Detail

One of my favourite series of works was my series of Totems. I researched the definition of the totem, which was a “symbol of the clan”. In the contemporary
context, our clan-like behaviour symbolized our throwaway mentality. It also symbolized an artist’s desire to make something beautiful out of something ugly.
Winning the prestigious Wynne prize at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2000 with the “Thong Totems” was a career highlight, as was being selected as a finalist in 2003 and again in 2004.
The objects yielded by the tide prompted a key question for me: how does one give form to the formlessness of detritus? I was well aware that the organising principles and my choices would determine the meaning of any work created. I began by sorting the found objects into material, natural or manufactured, then into colour and size. These categories suggested particular works: totem poles constructed from buoys or thongs, wall-based collages of driftwood, and, eventually, coloured plastics assembled into abstract fields that came to evoke semi-abstract landscapes.

Fred Williams (1927-1982)
You Yang’s landscape 1 (1963)
oil on Masonite, 137.0 x 180.3cm
Copyright Estate of Fred Williams.

Above: Fred Williams ‘Red Landscape’ ,Materials: Oil Paint on Canvas
Artwork Size 152 x 182cm Dated: 1981

Fred Williams
Lysterfield landscape (1969)
Oil on canvas 152.8cm × 183.0cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Copyright Estate of Fred Williams.

John Dahlsen
Title: Beach Detail 6
Materials: Found plastics,
resin (sustainable plant based).
primed Belgian Linen
Size: 208cm x 99cm Date: 2018

Above: Made Wianta
Calligraphic Wall 1987
Oil and Gold on Canvas, 243cm x 432cm

Above: Made Wianta
Full-Space Mosaic, 1989 Oil on Canvas
42 x 52cm

Dahlsen and Wianta also share an interest in the subject matter of environmentalism and sustainability as we can see from Dahlsen’s Styrofoam Totem (2016)and Wianta’s “Air Pollution” (2014).

Above: Made Wianta
“Air Pollution”, 2014
Motorcycles exhaust pipes, stainless steel

Artistic creativity is important for Dahlsen in the form of process orientation which he finds is necessary. “Gyre Studies” arranges colours harmoniously, bringing out the beauty of each object and putting debris onto a platform. Each object is saved and the once abandoned materials are given a new life as pieces of artwork. The objects speak for themselves; fingers and eye coordination become the tool and messenger of these found objects.
The process Dahlsen undertakes is often arduous, pouring all the materials he has collected onto the floor, sorting each by colour and size. During the collection of the debris he seeks the tiny pieces which people often miss when they are also picking up plastics from the beach. There is a satisfaction in this process as John states; “I will be much happier if there is no rubbish to pick up anymore, then this will begin to indicate that there are changes happening with how we are caring for the environment.”
“Gyre Studies” from 2020, are the follow up to the “Pacific Garbage Patch Studies” in 2018-2019. The exploration led to the introduction of charcoal and drawing into the process as he felt it would add another layer to the body of work as a whole and the drawing seems to highlight the random swirling notion of the ocean currents that make up the Gyres and hence the Garbage Patches.
The journey of John Dahlsen as a visual artist has evolved from painting to assemblage, sculpture and installation art, to his most recent work with new materials and mediums, that herald a meeting between his earlier painting and drawing from the 1990’s and his work from the last two decades working as an environmental artist with ocean litter. in “Gyre studies” Dahlsen uses charcoal, dry pigment and ink, familiar tools which Dahlsen has utilised from his early works on paper and canvas in the 90s. “The Dialogue” 1991, “Charcoal Peaks and Valleys”, 1991, for example, is a slow and cautious method developed over the years and a connection is easily discernible with his latest works. In these early works, shapes, layering, twirls and lines take the form of the landscape and “Gyre studies” marks both the continuation and evolution of a creative journey which Dahlsen has been dedicated to for over 30 years.

John Dahlsen
Dialogue (Triptych)
Materials: Oil, charcoal, wax and varnish on Belgian Linen
Collection: Kerry Stokes
Size: 120cm x 570cm – 3 panels
Date: 1991

Biography: John Dahlsen

“As a leading environmental artist and author, Dr. John Dahlsen is committed to engaging audiences on important social and environmental issues with his unique sense of aesthetics. His most recent body of work highlights the issue of plastic ocean litter. His environmental artwork include large sculptures made from found plastics encased in clear acrylic, woodblock and digital fusion prints on Japanese ‘Washi’ paper and large-scale paintings on canvas. The most recent works on Belgian linen and canvas are made from found plastics collected from Australia’s coastline and ecologically sustainable plant based resin.
John studied at the Victorian College of the Arts. He won Australia’s oldest art award, the Wynne Prize, at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2000 and was again a finalist in 2003 and 2004. In 2006 he was a finalist in the Sulman Award at the Art Gallery of NSW and has won other numerous awards. In 2004 his art represented Australia at the Athens Olympics.
He exhibits and is represented in major public and private collections in Australia and internationally. In 2014 John was awarded a Churchill Fellowship and travelled to Japan in January 2015 to work for 5 weeks with a master woodblock printer and created a limited edition series of 24 woodblock/digital fusion prints. He then went to Amsterdam and researched how van Gogh was influenced by Japanese woodblock prints.
John is a published author: “An Artist’s Guide to a Successful Career” was published by Common Ground Publishing in the US in December 2013. His book “An Accidental Environmental Artist” was published in 2014 by the US publisher: Alpha Academic Press in the US. In April 2016 his book chapter was published in the book Global South Ethnographies: Minding the Senses. He has written a number of published journal articles.
From 2014-2016 John lectured in art at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory, where he also completed his PhD, which was titled: Environmental art: Aesthetics, Activism and Transformation.