John Sabraw: Extracting Beauty from Toxic Water
By Riel Macklem
In order to create something beautiful, one needs to see its potential beauty first. Not all people can, but painter and Ohio University professor John Sabraw is one of those people.
Sabraw uses his art to draw attention to the deleterious effects of coal mine pollution. His interest peaked in 2008, when he went on a trip with the Kanawha Project, a faculty learning community at Ohio University. They toured the Ohio River region where the legacy of the coal-mining industry lives on. Sabraw was stricken by the visible effects of acid mine drainage pollution — the oranges, reds, and browns coated clean streams like expired milk.
Aquatic life isn’t the only thing that’s affected by this environmental dilemma. The Ohio River is the source of drinking water for more than 3 million people. For Sabraw, this isn’t just an environmental issue or a political issue, but a personal issue as well.
He recalls to me what it was like to go camping as a child, when pollution was less of an issue, or was at least less visible to the human eye. Sabraw was a military kid, so he and his family moved around quite a bit. Family camping trips kept him grounded, at peace.
“You used to be able to go to any stream, and there would be fish in it,” he says. “And you had the sensibility that when you came to these places, you were encountering a system. It was a really elaborate and beautiful and impossibly complex encounter. And I think in a lot of ways, it kept you humble.”
But then, you take a trip to the Ohio River, where toxic river sludge is pouring into the waters. Conspicuously missing are living things. It is difficult to have that same sort of sensibility, that sense of belonging, when faced with the unsightly evidence of pollution. Suddenly, you neither feel you are a part of this environment nor do you particularly want to be.
That is, unless you’re Sabraw. He encountered this startling, unfortunate scene, and instead of shutting his eyes to its ugliness as many might’ve done, he saw its potential beauty. He had a vision.
An environmentalist as well as an artist, Sabraw wanted to figure out a way to make the streams viable again, all the while raising awareness through a less traditional platform — his art. He learned that these polluted waters were colored by iron oxide — the same material used to make paint colors — and wondered if he would be able to source paint from them.
The Kanawha guide informed him that scientist and fellow Ohio University professor Guy Riefler was already devising a plan to turn toxic river sludge into paint pigments. Some time passed, and then in 2010, Riefler reached out to Sabraw. The two have been collaborating ever since.
Together, they’ve figured out how to transform toxic river sludge into paint. They extract the polluted water, neutralize the pH, and force the iron oxide to settle out. The resulting paint pigments are a range of yellow, red, brown, and black colors, and are incorporated into all of Sabraw’s artwork.
