By now it should be evident to artists that making art is not without some risk of exposure to harmful substances. But it is also evident that many artists do not pay much attention to the risk. Art students—even senior undergraduate and graduate students—are often wholly unprepared and uninformed about how to reduce their exposure to toxic materials, or even about what the risks are. This must mean that their teachers, who are also artists, do not discuss these issues with them and, perhaps, are relatively uninformed themselves.

Mention health and safety issues to your colleagues and fellow artists, and what do you get? Eye-rolling and other forms of mental glazing-over, along with sighs of, “I know, I know.” But what do we actually know? Monona Rossol’s book, The Artist’s Complete Health and Safety Guide, offers answers. In four hundred crisply written pages, she leads the reader through almost every aspect of the health consequences of using art materials.

Before examining individual media, the Guide spends a good deal of time on other matters of equal importance. In part 1, “The Regulated Art World,” Rossol explains the laws and regulations that apply to artists and their use of materials. Using clear language, she surveys the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations (including its Hazard Communication Standard), tells us about “right-to-know” laws and Material Safety Data Sheets, and describes other tools for controlling hazardous materials and training users to be aware of hazards and of personal rights and responsibilities.

The book provides a concise guide to the effects of chemicals on the body, and the many ways they enter it. Rossol makes it clear that this is a complicated subject, mainly because of the huge numbers of chemicals we encounter in our work. Toxicity is dependent on a number of elements: dose, acute (short-term) and chronic (long-term) effects (and those in between), cumulative effects, multiple exposures, synergistic exposures, and so on. Cancer is one obvious result of various sorts of exposures to some hazardous chemicals, but we also suffer problems with cell mutations, birth defects, allergic reactions, hypersensitivity, and organ damage. This last is significant: toxic exposures can lead to acute or chronic diseases of the skin, eyes, lungs, heart, blood, nervous system, liver, kidneys, bladder, and reproductive organs.

The final chapters of the book’s part 1 deal with the control of physical and chemical hazards, how to identify hazardous materials (with a section on labels, amusingly entitled “Reading between the Lies”), some general precautions about safety matters—beginning with basic good housekeeping, but also covering storage, labeling, handling and disposing of materials, and personal hygiene—as well as information about ventilation and respiratory protection. If this section lacks anything, it is an attention to the regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding the safe and legal disposal of hazardous art materials.

Part 2 of the Guide provides a comprehensive review of the five related groups of raw materials that artists use: solvents, pigments and dyes, metals and metal compounds, minerals, and plastics and adhesives. Each well-organized, comprehensive chapter defines the materials and explains their hazards, gives a set of guidelines for choosing safer alternatives, and provides a table listing specific materials by classes. Each material table includes pertinent technical information as well as comments on the types of hazards it can cause and other valuable observations. These tables are good for quick reference—you can quickly eliminate the most toxic elements from your studio.

Part 3, which comprises about half of the book, consists of sixteen chapters that provide precautions for individual mediums. The obvious materials are, of course, included: those used in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture (with separate chapters for welding, soldering and casting, and metal surface treatments), ceramics, woodworking, textiles, and photography. But Rossol also covers some less common mediums: those for glass, leatherworking, stained glass, and enameling. Again, each chapter provides clear definitions of the materials and their hazards, ending with a list of precautions artists should take when using them.

The final chapters of the book discuss risks to the reproductive system and how to avoid or lessen exposures to materials that may harm either a prospective parent or a developing fetus. Rossol also discusses safe ways to teach art, to both university students and children; this will be of great interest to university art professors.

The most provocative portion of this section discusses the politics of our general failure to teach studio art safely, and to keep our students’ safety in mind. Rossol offers a wake-up call:

… college students earn degrees that imply they are prepared for a professional career in art or education. Instead, they are not ready for a career, because they are completely unfamiliar with the laws that govern their work, they have never even seen their art practiced safely and legally, and they are prepared only to set up dangerous and illegal studios and classrooms of their own. In my opinion, schools granting degrees to such students are perpetrating a fraud. (353)

The Guide’s two appendices include a comprehensive list of sources, an annotated reference list, and a glossary.

In all, this book is the best review of the subject matter I have seen. It is uncompromising in its honesty and forthrightness, clearly written, blunt where it needs to be, and careful to explain the gray areas where our knowledge about the health hazards of art materials is incomplete. Every artist ought to have a copy in the studio as primary reference. Moreover, all teachers of art—at any level—should require their students to have it too, and to read it.