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4|04|2011
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Artists & Craftsmen on the Lunar Frontier |
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The Role of
Artists & Craftsmen on the Lunar Frontier
The rocket scientists may get us there, and even give us a way to hop around globally. But it is the chemical engineers who will figure out how we can "live off the land", giving us building materials, manufacturing stuffs, and craft materials. It is the entrepreneur who will find ways to make a buck for all of us out of these elements. It is the architect who will find a way to turn these prepared stuffs into habitual shelter, and the pressurization engineer who will find a way to keep the biosphere from leaking out. It is the biosphere engineers and agricultural people and waste mass processors who will find ways to keep us alive inside.
More .....
But it is the artists and craftsmen
especially, who, finding ways to give creative expression to their
talents using locally derived materials, who will give us that sense of
being home,
dealienizing the Moon, because they will have learned how to make
moonstuffs over in our own image and likeness.
The Challenge for
Early Lunan Artists
How could lunar pioneers express themselves in a paint medium derived entirely from local materials. The assumption [see first * asterisk note below] is that organic materials would be scarce or excessively expensive. Use of substances produced as agricultural byproducts in the settlement biosphere might be frowned upon - the rule being to plow everything back into the food chain and general biosphere support.The rubric chosen by the experimenter was to exclude all organic materials, and include only those inorganic materials that could eventually be processed by a lunar settlement from common regolith soils.
The spark that eventually led to this experiment was our stumbling upon the remark that "sodium silicate is the only known inorganic adhesive." Could "paints" be made using an adhesive as a medium rather than a solvent? All the elements in sodium silicate [sodium, silicon, oxygen] are commonplace in representative lunar regolith soils. If so, common metal oxides producible from the regolith could serve as pigments.
Fortunately, there was a local supplier of chemicals, Laabs Pharmacy in Milwaukee, that was able to help me round up what was needed: a gallon of sodium silicate [$9.95 a gallon, characterized as "pure Na2O-3.75SiO2, no water added"], and small amounts of various metal oxides. We wish to acknowledge Tom Volkman, head chemist at Laabs, who was most cooperative in our project. Yes, we did tell him what it was all for, once we had successfully produced the first painting. - P. Kokh
click for larger image
[A very unsatisfactory scan. There are no bluetones in the 8"x10" original.]
"Moon Garden #1"
Possibly the first painting done exclusively with materials that could be processed from the regolith soils in an early lunar settlement. Moon Garden #1 shows a plot of grass (light green) with three flowers (light green leaves, dark green stems; mid: orange center with yellow petals; r & l: rust center with pinkish petals) superimposed on a full Moon against starry sky with full Earth in corner. Backpainted on glass, the paints consist of ferric and chromium oxides, manganese and titanium dioxides, and sulfur in a medium of sodium silicate.
by Peter Kokh, September 30, 1994
- 1630 N. 32nd St.,
- Milwaukee WI 53208-2040
- (414) 342-0705
Metal oxides in a waterglass (sodium silicate) suspension, backpainted on glass, foreground first.
This painting is the first ever attempted, to my knowledge by anyone, using exclusively art materials/media that could be produced in an early lunar settlement, processing the local regolith dust. My purpose is to pioneer a medium future lunar settlers can use.
Sodium Silicate, a cousin of window glass, and, when hydrated, a liquid at room temperatures (keep bottle tightly closed when not in use, lest it begin crystallizing) is the only known inorganic adhesive. The water of hydration is the only available solvent. This is the basis of what I call waterglass "paints" or waterglazing. To this is added available colored powders.
"Greening the Gray", our second piece
(no larger image available)
A
Pioneer Palette
of "Moontones"
- The light to very dark gray lunar regolith powder soils are, of course, already available as is. While I do have a pinch of lunar simulant, my grays are mixes of Manganese Dioxide (black) and Titanium Dioxide white.
- Iron Oxide gives a rust, and when added cautiously to a preparation of white, produces the pinkish to rust colors in the painting.
- The pale yellow is Sulfur. With cautious amounts of iron oxide mixed in, orange hues are produced.
- For green, I used Chromium Oxide as is for veining, and pasteled with titanium dioxide and/or sulfur for leaves and grass.
- At first I found no lunar-producible blue. There seemed to be a couple theoretical possibilities such as cobalt aluminate, but I had not yet found a source. Accordingly, I decided to use a turquoise for the Earth in the background, upper left, made with nickel sulfate (copper is present on the Moon only in parts per billion traces, so far as we know). Unfortunately, the the nickel sulfate reacted chemically with both the waterglass and the neighboring oxides, messing up my "Earth".
- Eventually, I
found an extremely pricey ($121/28 grams) Cobaltous Aluminate
that provided a stunning bright blue.]
Some powders mix readily, producing a workable paste for painting. Others tend to coagulate almost immediately and applying them is more a matter of dabbing chunks of it to the glass before the sodium silicate adhesive dries. Three of the powders I have experimented with to date are in this difficult category: nickel sulfate, potassium chromate (bright yellow) and chromium trioxide (magenta).
For a canvas, settlers can use glass (front side, or back as here), unglazed ceramic tile, or metal sheet. I hope to continue experimenting.
Again, this is the very first known complete work with "paints" and "canvas" made of materials locally producible in a lunar settlement.
- Palette Development: An expensive Proposition
The
idea behind
this project is rooted in two premises:
- (1) lunar settlers will have to keep imports to the bare minimum of absolute essentials, and try to make do with what they can make from local materials.
- (2) their
garden / farm / biosphere, as it depends on carbon*, nitrogen*, and
probably hydrogen* from Earth [as well as local lunar oxygen and many
nutrients] will be designed to produce only food and clothing fibers,
everything being tightly recycled. It won't be permitted to withdraw
art materials and ingredients from the cycle.
NOTE: Lunar Prospector's confirmed discovery in 1998 of ample comet-derived water ices (probably with immixed carbon oxide and nitrogen ices) at both Lunar poles in permanently shaded crater areas may, in time, greatly relieve this second constraint.]
An article ("The First Lunan Artist") about this painting and the effort behind it, was published in Ad Astra, tin the January-February '95 issue, pp. 46-47. A color photo of the painting was included. Ad Astra is the magazine of the National Space Society.]
"Regolith
Impressionism"
Sodium Silicate is not easy to work with. You have to mix small less than teaspoonful amounts of the adhesive and metal pigment powder at a time and use it quickly, as it sets up fairly fast. I had to plan the painting carefully, so that, if practical, everything to be painted in a given color was done at the same time. Because the medium is so viscous, fine controlled detail is not possible. The painting that results will have much fine detail, but it will be largely serendipitous. Painting on the reverse side of the glass pane, as I had chosen to do, meant having to plan carefully - items in the foreground of the picture had to painted first, those in the background last. If there were void spot or streak "skips" in the "paint" as it dried on the glass (in moments) a second cover coat in another color or highlighting shade would produce welcome veining and texture visible from the front. The effect is somewhat impressionistic and indeed, slavish realism and accuracy are out of the question. As the pigments and medium and glass 'canvas' are all producible from the elements common in the pulverized powdery regolith soils of the Moon, I came to call my painting (at first dubbed "waterglazing") as "Regolith Impressionism", a fitting description.The idea of gallons of ready-to-use sodium silicate metal oxide paints being produced for the purpose of painting whole walls, for example, is out of the question. Painting an 8"x10" pane or smaller is just about right. One could, of course, paint a whole wall, if one wanted to take the time and exercise the patience and determination. Quilt-like murals might be just the ticket. Even "sponge painted" wallpaper like designs would be difficult. The flaking problem described below would have to be fixed before it would be worth making an attempt.
L.A.A.M.P. - Lunar
Appropriate Art Media Pioneers
It was desirable to get others involved, hopefully others with more practiced and highly developed artistic painting skills than mine - to see to what heights this new pioneer-appropriate medium might be pushed. The driving spark was twofold. (1) create, field test, and pre-debug a viable art medium for early lunar pioneers, and (2) capture the public imagination by demonstrating one small aspect of the coming lunar frontier in vivid concrete terms. To do this, we launched a special newsletter, Moonbow, for those who donated to our fund to buy more experiment chemicals. But there were few takers, and only two issues were ever circulated.
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