The resilience of sustainability, creativity and social justice from the arts & crafts movement to modern day “eco-painting”

•Arts & Crafts movement.•Art Nouveau/Art Deco.•EcoArt.•Resilience.•Art as Warning.

This paper develops an earlier one on key principles of Green Aesthetics published in City, Culture & Society. It extends the application of such principles backwards in time to the original Arts & Crafts movement as practised in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century, and in terms of contemporary eco-art, forwards to a variety of styles including site-specific art, environmental art (both strongly sculptural) and eco-painting, which is organic, local and sustainable. It is shown how, from the beginning, these styles have shown great resilience in the face of a dominant industrialist paradigm. In the process such 'outsider' art has maintained an evolving and striking creativity and innovativeness. The evolution in styles has also contained its own inner dynamic where some strands of eco-art favour modernity and modernism while others seek a synthesis of medieval modes of guild production yet with a view to producing for commercial markets. More recently a strong strand of extreme disenchantment is evident in the work of some 'land artists', for example represented at Fattoria de Celle sculpture park near Pistoia in Tuscany against today's capitalistically signed and saturated dominant semiotics. This is expressed in references in such work, including Richard Serra, Richard Long and Robert Morris to Neolithic motifs captured in the megalithic remains of such culture.