Processing Your Payment

Please do not leave this page until complete. This can take a few moments.

August 8, 2005

A breath of fresh air | UMaine prof's new product helps artists deal with toxic materials

By Sean Donahue
Artists, as the cliché goes, often suffer for their art. Mental anguish isn't the only price, though, given that artists' raw materials can produce toxic fumes, lung-irritating dust and other health hazards. Some modern observers speculate that Vincent Van Gogh was poisoned by his own lead-based paints; the symptoms include madness as well as the tendency to see halos around lights. So Van Gogh landed in an asylum, but in exchange the world has "The Starry Night."

If that story seems a little too pat, it shouldn't undercut the potential danger of some art supplies. In July, for example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency threatened to fine Maine College of Art in Portland $107,000 for improperly disposing of pottery glazes, old paint and solvents that the EPA considers hazardous wastes. But a new product from a husband-and-wife team in Bristol is designed to make working with those materials a little less risky.

For University of Maine associate professor of maritime history Warren Riess, inspiration came from watching his wife, pastel artist Kathleen Galligan, suffer from a chronic sinus condition that forced her to give up pastel work because of the dust it created. So he created an air-filter device that fits on the bottom of an artist's easel to collect dust and fumes before they spread to the room. A few years and several prototypes later, Riess and Galligan are now selling their product, named Artist's Air, for $1,099 through their own website (www.artistsair.com) and in two art supply stories on the East Coast.

It's a development that Riess says he never envisioned when first tinkering with air filters in his garage three years ago. "It was really Kathleen and her artist friends pushing me by saying, 'Other artists need this,'" says Riess of his inspiration to start a business. "Nobody thinks going into this that they're going to make a lot of money by creating an expensive product for one of the world's poorest professions."

Self-deprecation aside, Riess and Galligan are now actively ˆ— if modestly ˆ— pursuing the goal of breaking even this year. Through advertisements in trade publications, appearances at artists' conventions and word-of-mouth recommendations, they hope to sell at least 36 of the 50 Artist's Air units Riess had manufactured last December. So far, the pair has sold 27.

To help that effort, they're hoping for a boost from the growing awareness of the potential health effects of materials such as oil-based paints, solvents and pastel dust ˆ— and the fact that, to their knowledge, there's no other air filtration product exactly like theirs on the market. Existing air filtration or purification products for artists range from a box fan placed in the studio window to a multi-thousand-dollar, custom studio ventilation system.

Jacob Shurkin, owner of the Madison Art Shop in Lakewood, N.J., is one of the retailers who began selling Artist's Air in July. "I saw right away that this was needed," says Shurkin, who first heard of the product when a company that supplies parts for it told him he should check it out. "That same day I had a customer call us looking for something just like this: an air purifier that attached right to his easel. I had never heard of such a thing."

The shrinking dollar sign
Although currently a marine archeologist, Riess reached backed to his college physics classes ˆ— in particular, fluid dynamics ˆ— to create Artist's Air. While pondering the problem of venting the air in his wife's studio, Riess realized it might make sense to trap dust and fumes as close to the canvas as possible.

That idea led him to design a steel box that attaches to the bottom of the easel. The box is connected by a six-inch hose to a canister-style filter unit that uses both a HEPA filter to capture microscopic particles and activated carbon to eliminate solvents and vapors. The canister is on wheels, making the entire easel and filter array mobile.

Galligan admits she was skeptical at first that Riess' device would work, but she found that it eliminated the irritating dust that had kept her from working in pastels. "I've been working with it now for over a year with no [sinus] trouble whatsoever," says Galligan.

Those results, plus requests from Galligan's artist friends for their own filter devices, led Riess to investigate commercial production. Last spring, he turned to Tom Christiansen at the UMaine Advanced Manufacturing Center for advice on materials and manufacturing.

Wiscassett-based Coastal Enterprises Inc. helped him formulate a business plan. Then, with an initial investment of $20,000 in personal funds, Riess had the first 50 Artist's Air units produced by suppliers Bangor Roofing and Sheet Metal, which makes the metal boxes, and Quebec-based AllerAir, which sells the filter components. Those suppliers ship the parts to Riess' home, where he assembles them and ships them to customers.

One big hurdle to quick sales, admits Riess, is the $1,000 price tag, which he says reflects the cost of high-quality materials such as filters and the steel box. But response from initial customers makes him optimistic that artists with serious health concerns will be willing to make the investment. North Yarmouth-based painter Sandra Quinn, who bought an Artist's Air this spring, agrees.

As an encaustic painter, Quinn uses special tinted waxes that are melted on a hot palette before being applied to a canvas. The fumes from the melted wax, says Quinn, were giving her headaches and forcing her to take several breaks from painting during the day. With the Artist's Air, however, she says she's been able to paint for eight hours at a time with no headaches, and no lingering smell of wax in her house. "When you weigh [the price] against giving up something you love to do, that dollar sign gets a little less and less," says Quinn.

So far, at least, Riess is pleasantly surprised that he faces no direct competition from another maker of an easel-attached air filter. And while he knows his lack of competition likely won't last forever, he also thinks that companies that mass produce air filters aren't in any hurry to modify their devices specifically for the art world. "There's such a small market, no one in their right mind would try it," says Riess.

That realistic take on the market potential has helped Riess and Galligan keep their goals for Artist's Air modest. An even bigger influence on those goals may be the fact that neither is interested in giving up their day jobs. While they hope the company will break even this year and continue to grow slowly, the pair's ambitions don't extend too far beyond helping a handful of artists by shipping Artist's Air from their garage. "If we were selling one a day instead of one a week, I think we'd be happy," says Riess. "That's about as big as we'd want to get."

Sign up for Enews

Most Recent

Most Recent

Comments

Order a PDF