Archives for posts with tag: abstract art
Batik is one of my favorite hobbies. I started early this year, usually I get into these projects around the new year when it’s too cold to do anything outside.
I started with a film still from a video found on YouTube.
I drew out the design in pencil on a piece of linen and painted red and yellow fish with Jacquard’s painting dye. Let it dry to set. Then, melted wax to 350 degrees and brushed it over the fish so they would not be dyed in the subsequent dye bath, or, wherever I wanted to keep the image white. The wax acts as a resist to the dye.
I dyed it in a light Caribbean Blue for an hour, agitating it here and there.
With each dye bath, first mix up the Procion MX dye in a container and add this concentrated dye to about 2 quarts of warm water, which is enough to cover about 14 inches of cloth. Add a little salt to the dye bath, then put the fabric in and let it sit for about 10 minutes. Take out the fabric and add about a teaspoon of Soda Ash to the salty dye and mix it up. Put the fabric back in the dye solution and agitate. Let it be in the dye for at least 30 minutes to an hour.
Hang the fabric and let the dye adhere to the fabric, about 10 to 30 minutes or it can dry overnight.
Wash the fabric with Synthrapol and let it dry.
I added wax to the piece where I wanted to keep it light blue.
I made a darker shade of Caribbean Blue for the next dye bath.
Hung fabric for a least 30 minutes to let the dye adhere to the fibers, washed it out to get rid of excess dye and let it dry. Then, I added more melted wax to the piece where I wanted it this shade of blue.
After adding the wax I put it in a dye bath of Robin’s Egg Blue, Wisteria Blue and a little Scarlet Red. When dyed over the Caribbean Blue, it produced a purplish hue.
Let the dye adhere to fabric. Wash it and hang it up to dry.
I added more wax to keep the purple color and put it in a Black dye bath for at least an hour. The final dye is tricky because it’s your darkest shade that will make the other colors pop, but it’s also saturating fibers, that by now, are filled with a lot of dye particles, so you have to wash the fabric out thoroughly with a little extra Synthrapol, add more dye than usual and keep it in the bath longer.
Final dry. I washed it out and then boiled the piece for a few hours.
Boiling will get out most of the wax. If not, iron the piece between pieces of thick paper until all the wax is gone.
Final piece in window.
One piece of Batik can take a few days to finish, this one took me a couple of weeks. I’ll let the fabric dry overnight sometimes and just work on the piece whenever I can. The end result is always a surprise. It’s a little bit like developing film in a dark room.
Happy New Year!
To see more batik, visit Wax Painting Gallery. Batik as contemporary art.
“loveline”
“learning on the line”
“windzip”
“in a garden”
“static moonlight”
This last image was taken outside. I did add more yellow notes and brightened up the white.
From the ink sketch, I knew that I wanted to keep this image as simple as possible. The horizon line was the most important part of the scene, it needed show how expansive this space can be. After adding more layers of wax to get that eroding feeling of things past, the picture became a heavily textural piece with the overhead viewpoint just askew. When there is plenty of texture, it seems to create a more energetic feeling with a sense of time moving along.
During this retrograde period I have been going over completed and undone sketches of the past. With some of them, like this one, there was a very simple idea that grew out of itself. The ideas for Stage were about searching for an emotional light, trying to capture the feeling of being alone and all the power within that. Finished in 2005.
This piece is not quite finished. There may need to be more sewing in foreground and around the abstract layering of wax. The figures in this piece appeared and disappeared. I wanted to create a static about them, but each time I brought them back into detail. The title of the piece is still up for grabs. Using the right words to describe this is not coming at the moment. The image started a few years ago, when I was painting the bleedthrough (future) series. The image was of two beings creating another in their likeness and this is how they went about it, putting a pail into a long trench in the ground. Although these figures were supposed to be more alien like, they kept reappearing as strictly human. I went along with it and any other detail that arose. But now this painting has ended up belonging to a different series; making it so, where the human/earth relationship is more present.
channeling the abstract 