Attached to Her Art

It may be a smaller space than she’s used to, but the garage of Elena Osterwalder’s Upper Arlington home has been the birthplace of some of her largest artistic works to date.

For 30 years, Osterwalder put brush to canvas, learning the transparency of oil paints and how layering them affects color. Finally, a bout with breast cancer gave the 70-year-old a change in medium.

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

In pursuit of a more natural alternative to dangerous cadmium, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers a probable human carcinogen, Osterwalder turned back to her Mexican roots. Dried cochineal, parasitic beetles that live on cacti, have been used for centuries to create a vibrant red color. She learned of cochineal on a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, where she visited an art paper workshop and saw hand- made paper dyed with natural colors.

Osterwalder 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.

All of this takes place in the garage studio, where Osterwalder works on a large table fashioned from sawhorses and plywood from a home improvement store. Color-splattered carpet remnants on the floor are the only record of each individual batch; no two are ever the same, she says.

ABOVE: Osterwalder displays a work in progress, made with paper she pulled apart and stitched back together with hand-dyed alpaca wool yarn. BELOW: Osterwalder uses mulberry bark Amate paper created by Mexican artisans.

Once cooled, the dye is poured into a shallow plastic bin, where pieces of handmade Amate paper soak in the rich color. Osterwalder 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

“We’ve done four projects with Dave Fox in three years and their team continues to hit home runs. Our quality of life has improved because of what they bring to the table and our home has become more enjoyable.”

John and Betsy S.

grant from the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture.

One finished installation, now housed in Osterwalder’s studio, 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.

Her artwork can be seen online at www. elenaosterwalder.com or in a retrospective at Art Access Gallery in Bexley from March 2-April 19. 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 decade.

“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 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.

Lisa Aurand is editor of Tri-Village Magazine. Feedback welcome at laurand@ pubgroupltd.com.