From Grocery Bag to Commercial Artwork

Wayland artist Dan Balter has an obsession with Whole Foods Market's paper grocery bags.

His obsession takes the form of painting on them.

Balter is the co-founder of Fireseed Arts, an artists' collective whose goal is connecting eco-artists with the patrons of the art. He is primarily a painter and some time ago discovered that paper Whole Foods bag make for excellent canvases.

Wayland's Earth Day Fair in late April brought Fireseed Arts and Balter's artwork specifically to the attention of Whole Foods Market.

"The work of the group is so closely aligned with Whole Foods Market’s Core Values we jumped at the chance to show some of Dan’s work in our store," according to a Whole Foods blog post. "What could be better than a recycled art installation that uses re-purposed Whole Foods Market paper bags as the medium?"

Multiple pieces in Balter's Whole Foods Market bags series are now on display at the Wayland grocery store. In an interview with Leslie Herger for Whole Foods, Balter said the bags are part of a larger series about memory and honor.

"Each bag painting is numbered and will reach 10,000 in 10 or 20 years," Balter said in the Whole Foods blog interview. "Each person represented on a bag led a life, usually silent and an unremarkable life, or so called unremarkable. Each life is remarkable, each soul is a world. And for a number of reasons not really clear why their memory is not carried forward. The person, everything that they were, everything that they valued, their traditions, the home they kept, their remarkableness is forgotten. The 10,000 souls paintings are a way to honor their memory, without fully knowing who they are or what happened."

Balter's artwork is on display now at . Artwork created by  at Viva Mexican Grill, and Fireseed Arts last fall established an at the Wayland Transfer Station.