A Passion for Batik
by Shahidul Alam
The spiral staircase leading to his den exudes modernity. The shiny metal rails offset against the solidity of dark wood are in bright relief against the orange yellow walls.
Mohammad Najib Nor bridges the solidity of tradition and the pragmatism of utilitarian fashion with his own presence. His thickset physique betrayed by the mischief in his eyes. When I ask him to display the colourful fabric draped across his shoulders, Najib does it with aplomb — swirling the cloth around him like a nubile dancer.
He becomes animated as we talk about Batik, his art and his passion. A flashback to the traditional usage of Batik takes us to the expectant mother. He talks of the batik cloth suspended over her, protecting mother and child in womb from lurking evil spirits. To Najib, Batik is more than a shape on fabric, more than a technique for rendering form, colour and texture. It is alive. A language rich in symbols and metaphors. A vibrant form of tactile storytelling. Sensual in its touch. Fluid in its narrative.
He talks of the phallus and the vagina. Of the spirit and the profound. Of Buddhism and war. Of architecture and dance. He refuses to categorise it in terms of fabric. Seeing rather the magic of creation that rises from the pre-visualisation of form. As an artist he sees the linear flow from water colour. The imagery evolving from negative space. The visual culture of the medium and its identity. He sees the geometry of the triangle as a metamorphosis of the human form. Puberty, marriage, birth, death and the rites of passage in between, are all woven around this fabric. Through giving and acceptance, through preservation and use, each finds one’s location in a tapestry signifying, identifying, embedding, circumscribing, the personal within the familial, in a complex social hierarchy.
Najib refuses to accept the categorisation of Batik as a traditional art form and sees its encroachment into contemporary art as a welcome intrusion. To him it is much more than clothing. The wearer is the object d’art. The visual and the textural unified in fashion and in utility, seen as a lived performance. His experimentation extends not only to the medium, where he weaves, materially and metaphorically, between natural fibres and modern alternatives oscillating between the linkages of source, but also to the diffusion of motifs. Fruit, trunk, bark and fibre merge as banana trunk seamlessly goes into cloth. He takes the openness of the medium to explore it as an art form, as a vehicle for design. Assimilating new ideas, exploring new markets, transcending boundaries, Najib revisits the form, not only by reaching into the past, and recognising the influence of cave drawings and the flatness of perspectives of Egyptian art and the tonalities of Persian drawing but also through recognition of the influence of contemporary Malaysian visuals.
Appreciating the role played by the 1st lady of Malaysia in taking Batik to another level, Najib is open to the diverse influences of western art form. He embraces the utilitarian changes brought about by market pressures. Rather than seeing this transformation as a threat, he sees the markets of Germany and Japan, the catwalks of London and New York as the new theatre for his favourite performance art.
While he recognises that one cannot force Malaysian forms into other cultures, his methods are subversive. By accepting change, he seeks to extend the reaches of his art form. For him the needs of the present generation, stretches the limits of Batik beyond tradition, beyond sarong, into high fashion. If Najib has his way, the Javanese pagi-sori, once traded in the 50s and 60s in Singapore’s Arab Street and Penang’s Chowrasta Market, will in its reincarnated form, be a must-have in Parisian fashion parades.
The Art of Batik Painting
by Beth Mccoy Evans
My artist this week is none other than my own dear wife and fellow-conspirator, Beth McCoy Evans. I can counter any charges of blatant nepotism by explaining that not only is she one of the foremost Batik artists in America, but that she is also the love of my life. We met on-line eight years ago when I was living at the house that we now share in Northern India and she was living in Huerfano County. We both have large websites with galleries of our work; she admired my Batik portraits and I liked her landscapes and still-lifes and we quickly started an email dialogue about representational Batik painting. We corresponded for almost a year before she took an enormous leap of faith and flew over to Europe to meet me in London. Two weeks later, I packed up my life and flew to Denver and we have been joined at the hip ever since.
For those who do not know what Batik is-and there are many- it is a method of painting on cloth. It is widely practiced in Indonesia, all over Asia and Africa where it has been a highly respected art form for at least two thousand years. You have probably seen the archetypical Grateful Dead tee-shirts with their skulls or peace sign symbols on coloured backgrounds. Batik is a wax-resist process; hot wax is used as a medium to separate dye colors. In its simplest form, the artist starts with a piece of white cloth, usually cotton or silk, and applies hot wax, using a brush or a pen-like tool called a tjanting, to any area that she wishes to keep white in her painting. If the picture is to be of white clouds in a blue sky, for example, the cloud-shaped areas are covered with the wax. When the wax is cool and hard, the cloth is dipped into a pot of cold water blue dye or painted over with blue dye, using a brush. The wax resists or repels the dye, whilst the rest of the cloth is dyed blue. When the wax is removed, the artist is left with white clouds on a blue sky. Batik paintings characteristically have a veined pattern on them; this is caused by the wax cracking and allowing the dye to enter and dye the cloth.
But Beth takes this basic process a lot further. She often repeats this same process fifty or more times, dyeing her cloth from light to dark or white to black, superimposing dye after dye to create her pictures. It is a painstaking process that can take weeks to complete and takes a special patience and a rare ability to envisage her finished piece from the beginning and then to work backwards in order to achieve the desired result. Batik is definitely not an instant or even quick art form and there is little room for maneuver or changes along the way. Each painting is a one-shot deal and one has to learn to live with one’s mistakes.
So why work in Batik, Beth?
She says:
“I still get excited by that magic moment when, three quarters of the way along, the image first ‘pops’ out. It’s a genuine rush when the picture becomes apparent and clear for the first time after a long slow process and that moment is addictive. Plus, I like working with cloth. It’s tactile and that’s what I like. Before I did batik, I painted on cloth and made hand-painted clothing, which I used to sell in ‘The Wild Iris’, my gift shop in Cuchara, Colorado. I’d always known about Batik, started to dye clothing and Batik was a logical step from that. I started to make batiked canvas cloth bags which sold very well and moved on to doing frameable Batik paintings. I had always painted with oils or acrylics on canvas and Batik was just an extension of this.
Whilst painting clothes in Cuchara for three years, I was inundated with special orders and this developed my drawing skills massively. It also explains the versatility of my subject matter; I like to paint landscapes, animals, people, still lifes and architectural scenes. Learning to connect the dots has connected the wide range of my paintings.”
Beth started to batik in a Pointillist style two years ago. It is a technique used by the French Neo-Impressionist painters like Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in the late nineteenth century and is the scientifically based use of coloured dots, in Beth’s case points of wax on dye, a form of optical color mixing. This mixing of the colors takes place in the eye of the beholder, not on the cloth. When done correctly, there is a luminescence in the painting that isn’t found otherwise. It is a technique, unique to Beth in the Batik world, which works particularly well in this fiber medium.
Beth goes on to say:
“Sometimes being a full-time professional artist can be hard, especially in these difficult economic times, but it has afforded me the freedom and the luxury of being able to travel. In the past two years alone, I have been to India twice for long periods, to Spain and to the UK and have taught batik and had shows, along with my husband Jonathan, in the south of England and Köln, Germany. I have just been invited to exhibit my work at a Batik gallery in Malaysia in 2011. I also do gallery shows and top-end art festivals in Colorado and all over the States.”
She continues:
“I grew up in Maryland but came to Colorado over twenty years ago where I had family. Coming to live in southern Colorado is something I had wanted to do all my life. My grandmother and her family, originally from Oklahoma, walked across the country to settle in Kim, East Colorado. At sixteen, she was the first school teacher in Kim, setting up and teaching classes in her father’s home. She worked until she was seventy six, mostly in one-roomed schoolhouses. I cherish the small book she wrote about her experiences as a pioneer in Colorado. My Dad graduated from La Junta High School and I spent my summer vacations with my grandmother there.
After living out of a suitcase for seven years and traveling around the world a couple of times, coming back to settle in Colorado City, feels like coming full circle and coming home again. Southern Colorado is as beautiful as any other place I’ve seen.”
Even though she is now an internationally recognized Batik artist, Beth prefers to keep a relatively low profile in this community although recently she has been seen selling our imported handmade Indian scarves and shawls at local art shows. She is busy working on her Batik paintings in a new studio and with building an addition onto our house by Lake Beckwith. I know her to be a shy and unassuming woman for whom her art comes before almost everything else.
To finish on a somewhat personal note, as a fellow artist and writer, Beth has given me the space and freedom to do the work I want to do and to get out and about in the community. She is my best friend and I am her number one fan; as her husband, I sometimes think that I am nothing without her and that together, we are unstoppable.
This Christmas, you can see Beth’s Batik paintings at the Sangre de Cristo Center in Pueblo, in the Commonwheel Gallery of Manitou Springs, at First Street Gallery in Trinidad and at the Rye Gallery. She is now available to teach classes in the Batik medium and may be contacted at bethtik@gmail.com or through her website www.batikartbybeth.com.
New Batik & The Fruit of Modernism
by Jeannie Cotter
Fast forward to year 3015. Imagine being in a time-capsule and transported into a new city – you see batik monuments erected on the streets, nicely done almost resembling art sculptures. Artists begin to speak of wax in abstract language. Instead of wax being used as a dye-resistant agent on a piece of fabric, it can be seen as borders that join different continents of the world. The rain seems like wax applied on batik fabric and a great leap has been made. Welcome to seeing things in 11-dimension.
A sort of telepathy occurs between David Kibuuka and his viewers. Being one of the originators of Fragmentation in Batik, Kibuuka believes genetically, we are all artists. It is only that some of us strongly express the ability to create objects.
Born in Uganda (East Africa), David Kibuuka left Uganda in 1977 for Nairobi, Kenya to continue his studies in fine art. Encouraged by his parents and late brother Henry Lumu to the path of art, Kibuuka loves art as it gives him unlimited freedom of expression and is therapeutic to his soul. His late brother Henry Lutalo Lumu had a great influence on him.
Traditional batik technique came from Java, Indonesia to East Africa in the 60’s. A number of Ugandan artists left Uganda during the heights of Idi Amin regime to sell and work in Nairobi, Kenya in 1976. The late Henry Lumu Lutalo revolutionized the traditional batik technique to match his realistic painting in watercolour and oil. Kibuuka being a student of realistic pencil drawing was able to learn from his older brother the technique of Modern Batik. Kibuuka added a number of components like pure toning, reversed half tones and fragmentation. This dramatically altered the technique from the traditionally cracked background.
Through the guidance of his brother, Kibuuka was greatly influenced by the western masters like Rembrandt, Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Gauguin. He began painting at an early age and sold his first painting when he was 11 years old. He enjoys working in oils, acrylic, watercolour and modern batik. A number of his paintings depict ethnic subjects, wild life and nature.
To Kibuuka, the human civilization is incubated in art – without it, we wouldn’t have a blue print of where to go and what to invent. Art is being repackaged in high tech and the future trends in art will be on flat screens and cyber galleries. But the original art will always be king to collectors.
Some of his latest paintings are focused on spiritual life. Paintings like Thorns and Life Force and Pain, Power, Glory depict such spiritual energy. The whole idea is to transport the viewer into the spiritual world or motivate them to think about it.
Inspired by life to paint, Kibuuka also believes humans live in a space of time called life and in his timeline he would like to leave something behind when he’s gone. That inspires him to keep on painting and assist others who are not as fortunate on this good earth. Apart from painting, Kibuuka is also involved in fundraising activities with a number of organizations for humanitarian purposes. He loves movies, especially science fiction ones.
He discovered batik through his high school teacher in 1974. Amazed by how wax and dyes in fabric produced different results, Kibuuka came up with a technique called the fragmentation technique and began using the technique in modern batik. Fragmentation can be manipulated to create all kinds of abstract patterns and designs in the background that eventually becomes part of the subject matter. e.g. compositions like Mother and Child, Togetherness and many more. This unique style remains a characteristic of East African Modernism.
Most of his clients could not separate his modern batik art technique from some of his acrylic or watercolour paitings, so he wanted them to see the difference between the other media. Hence, the birth of a book on batik. His latest book “Modern Batik Workshops” has 50 colour plates that go back as far as 1981 to 2007.
Painting aside, Kibuuka organises modern batik workshops that are held all over Canada, the U.S. and the Caribbean. They are intended to motivate, inspire and empower youth who are artistic. He has a good number of adult and senior students who love the workshops for their therapeutic energy in the process of applying wax and dyes on fabric.
His advice to young artists: “Stay positive and focused. Innovation should always be the word, use the Internet to social network in the global village.”
Readers can view David Kibuuka’s artworks at www.modernbatikartworkshops.com.
The Cosmos That Bind Nizam Ambia
by Cecilia Tan
The interview with Nizam Ambia took place on a sunny Monday morning in October, 2008 at his company, Kubang Gajah Blatik Industry in Kampung Kubang Gajah, Negeri Sembilan. The primary business of the company is to design, manufacture and market batik fabrics, fashion products and Nizam’s art works, under the global brand name “Ambia”. Throughout the interview, he remained totally engaged, ever willing to converse and explain. Nizam Ambia is slender and lanky, and a handsome figure at his age. His aspect is intense and jovial, his manner gracious and courtly. His hair is stylish and neatly kept; he speaks with a strong KL accent. When he talks, the small shifts of his slender body, the voice’s inflections and the mind’s dartings reveal a fashion designer passionate about his art.
Nizam Ambia was born and grew up in the royal town of Seri Menanti, Negeri Sembilan (Malaysia). When he was very young, Nizam developed a passion for drawing and fashion, often spending hours on sketching his imaginations and keen observations. He has always been inspired by the beauty of nature, the environment, the cosmos as well as the mystical world.
Nizam graduated in Graphic Design from the University of Institute Technology MARA (UiTM). When he first started to explore the world of art, financial support was always his main challenge. On the other hand, Nizam has never worried about branding because he believes that the work will speak for itself – perhaps with just a little support from the media. His greatest strength is his passion for art which keeps him from giving up easily.
In the past, he has worked in advertising agencies, as a stage set designer at a TV3 station and as lecturer of art at the Lim Kok Wing University College of Creative Technology. During his first years, he experimented with a variety of compositions which molded him as one of the most versatile Malaysian artists in existence today.
His passion in utilizing mixed medium in his art work illustrates his love for all beings on the face of this earth. Nizam Ambia has created a significant and unique brand of work that is all his own. His infatuation with other different kinds of artistic expression has turned into an enthusiastic love affair with art installations, such as an eight-foot metal phoenix in the campus of Lim Kok Wing University College of Creative Technology, plus other sculpture work, interior designs, stage designs and landscaping.
Nizam’s enthusiasm for life is manifested in all his creative work in the world of art and fashion. In his dignified yet down-to-earth style, he has won several awards, the latest being, the Grand Prize for Piala Seri Endon 2004 in Batik design competition in the fashion category with his batik-infused interpretations of the nyonya kebaya and baju melayu. This was Nizam’s quantum leap into the world of fashion. Apart from a 3rd place award for a national level landscaping competition, he has also won Gold awards in three consecutive years (2000-2002) for Kolam designing competition at the Kuala Lumpur City Centre.
Nizam Ambia has been honoured as the only Malaysian batik designer to conceptualize and draw a set of impressive batik panels as backdrop for the “Force of Nature”, an international charity concert in Kuala Lumpur on March, 2005. His work has received much international acclaim and he hopes to produce even more works for the international market in the future. Contemporary batik is often considered formal western attire which has abandoned its Malaysian roots. To Nizam Ambia however, batik is an inherent part of the Malaysian identity and contemporary batik is included as part of this culture. He feels that batik should be allowed to ride the waves of change and have a fresh look that changes with the times.
For his inaugural solo fashion show in August 2005, Nizam developed a new style of batik design known as blatik, a new perception of batik fusion. Blatik designs portray multi-layered depth and its versatility goes beyond one’s imagination. Nizam has thus redefined batik norms and perceptions. In essence, batik art has become paintings on fabric by Nizam, showcasing him as a painter. He feels that batik is changing fast due to the large number of copycats and mass producers of batik printed fabric. He believes batik artists will need to personalize their art in the future so that clients can have more choices.
Nizam’s advice to those aspire to follow his footsteps is that artists must be true and honest to themselves and work. That’s how they can create wonders in whatever they do. In order to generate awareness in the batik market of their existence, artists must participate in exhibitions and expose themselves to the media.
The key characteristic that makes Nizam who he is today is that he never competes with other artists or their work because he knows that the competit
ion lies between the work and the artist. He strives to improve everyday and sees the journey of an artist as one that is full of joy and pain. Due to his passion however, Nizam Ambia will never give up and engrosses himself in every painting he creates – infusing his passion for life and art into every masterpiece.
Diaman, the Mah Meri: Woodcarver
by Cecilia Tan
The Mah Meri (forest people) of Pulau Carey (Carey Island) makes up part of the colourful Orang Asli indigenous minority of Peninsular Malaysia. Pulau Carey is an estuarine island situated off the coast of Kuala Langat and is connected by a roads and bridge. There are 5 Mah Meri villages on
the island. The island is widely known for its internationally acclaimed native woodcarvings. Most of the villagers presently earn a living by working in the surrounding palm estates, or have their own smallholding, others are fishermen or produce other forms of handicrafts to supplement their income.
And Diaman Bin Kisah is 47 year old woodcarver born and raised on this island. Upon visiting his home at Kampung Sg Bumbun, one would definitely be impressed with the quality of his finely crafted wood carvings. mainly ‘spirits mask’ (topeng), a subject which is held dearly in his heart as with all members of his community. The ‘spirit mask’ and ancestral figures (Moyang) have all different kinds of mythical characteristics; often relating to folktales about the community and traditional roles played by the unseen.
The wooden products are crafted entirely from a type of locally utilised wood called Kayu Nyireh Batu, a hard redbrown wood of a mangrove tree (Carapa Obovata) and also Kayu Pulai (Alstonia Scholaris). These are used to produce the ‘spirit mask’ with names like Topeng Moyang Naning, Spirit Beliung, Spirit Bojos, Topeng Sembunyi or Topeng Bunting Beliung. Most of the depicted wooden crafted spirits are of the ocean, swamp and jungle.
Coming from a traditional native arts wood carving family; Diaman is happily married and also a proud father of ten who has taken on the responsibility of carrying on with his family’s woodcarving tradition. It is through his creativity that he now solely earns a living through the sale of his very own hand-made woodcarvings. Diligently carving out an honest living, Diaman is a traditionalist who has chosen not to abandon his native and cultural roots. It is no easy task to have chosen the life of a wood carver, as natural talent must first exist in the chosen individual to produce good work. The amount of time it takes to work on these individual carvings places a real limit to the numbers which can be physically produced at any one time. They are well worth the wait and buyers of his works might consider themselves even luckier if they can find them available instantly!
The wood sculptures are a cultural heritage of the Mah Meri and have been extremely popular with foreign tourists who visit the country, as well as with native art collectors from around the globe. One can expect to find Mah Meri wood craft at various Tourism centres, as in the National Craft Centre situated at Jalan Conlay, in Kuala Lumpur. Currently a selection of Daiman’s works can be viewed at TMS Art Gallery, Taman Melawati,KL. And it goes without saying – that they are simply adorable conversation pieces for the home!
Art as Inspiration
by Gerard Yeoh & Francis Chen
One fine morning when I was driving to a nearby coffee shop for breakfast, I found a very interesting art gallery. What attracted me was the dozens of small oil paintings which were displayed at the window. Then I decided to walk inside and have a chat with the owner – Ms. Belinda Cheah to learn more about family portraits. She showed me some works of an artist from Myanmar, Min Yin.
An art graduate of the University Of Culture, Myanmar, Min Yin paints only family portraits. He creates his portraits from photographs. All he needs is one photo of each person and about 20 minutes of their time for an interview.
He has painted families just about anywhere you can imagine: the family gathering–sitting around the living room, on a boat, in the yard, piled up in bed listening to a story, at the beach, gathered around the kitchen table—you name it, and he had probably painted it.
A really fun part of these portraits is discovering what is important to the family and to each individual. He uses this information to set his portraits apart from more straightforward renderings finding ways to subtly tell the family story using mementos and symbols he tuck away in the painting.
For instance, if a couple went to Cameron Highlands on their honeymoon, he could hang a little strawberry chime somewhere. Or, if they fell in love at an art gallery, he could add just enough of a logo to a small glass filled with flowers to visually capture that moment. If dad likes gardening, he could stick a trowel in his pocket. If mom loves tea, he can paint a teapot birdhouse.
Now lots of people worry about what type of information they need to come up with (especially the husbands!). But, no worries, the artist has a pretty good interview process to get the information that he needs to make any family portrait personal. He will take ideas and input, for sure, but people need not worry, and together with his visual subject, he would figure out what to paint.
A really interesting thing has evolved in regards to family portraits. Those of you who are familiar with Min Yin’s artworks know that he doesn’t put faces on people he paints. It is the same with his family portraits. No one ever wants the faces because then a painting doesn’t look like a work of Min Yin.
So, how do you have a portrait painted without a face? He thinks of them as emotional portraits. He understands how to show the relationship between family members and portray each person with special tenderness.
When he paints a family portrait, he endeavours to create a blessing for the family by memorializing a happy moment at a certain place and time. He weaves in the elements that tell about the family…just how it is on a good day. Once he is done with the painting, he will write a blessing on the painting, something that anchors and states what is good about belonging to one another. Sometimes it happens that the family has their own language, something they say to one another, a favourite scripture, or the like, which serves as or can be used for inspiration.
When all is complete, his goal it to create a portrait that will, even on a tough, hard day, remind everyone how great it is to belong to one another and how deep their love is.
Six sources Of Inspiration
Sometimes when you look at a blank page, your mind goes blank too. You want to draw or paint, but what? Here are six sources of inspiration to get you started in drawing, painting, or even scrapbooking. Once you get started, you’ll find that one idea leads to another. Try picking one theme to explore consistently over several days or even weeks, adding written notes about your thoughts and feelings to your sketchbook.
Everyday Objects
Some of the most beautiful works of art focus on the daily life. A simple mug, or a piece of fruit can be inspiration for a simple and beautiful drawing. You can concentrate on accurate shapes and values, or explore expressive line and atmospheric tone. Try drawing and painting one object in various ways and with different mediums. Do a scrapbook or sketchbook page with a sketch of your favourite mug on your kitchen table, a photo and a note about why you love it.
Your Family and Friend
Forget drawing portraits from washed-out, glossy-magazine celebrity photos. Draw real people. People you care about. Self portraits guarantee you a willing model, and are a time-honoured way for artists to express their deepest feelings. Friends and families can be sketched as they go about their day, or drawn in detail posing. These drawings can become treasured mementoes, even family heirlooms.
Inspiration from the Garden and Nature
Complex natural forms can offer pleasantly forgiving subjects for drawing and painting -nobody knows if it’s a wobbly line or the shape of the leaf. And they can also be challenging and complex. It is up to you. You can explore nature up close, drawing leaves and pinecones, or on a grand scale, sketching scenes.
Furry Friends
Draw your pet sleeping by the hearth, or sketch them at play. Or draw from a photograph taken in natural light, at pet’s eye-level. Have a day sketching at the zoo. Zoo animals offer a range of interesting challenges – how do you draw a crocodile’s skin or a leopard’s spots? Create a series of scrapbook or sketchbook pages with zoo sketches. Draw the entrance with a wall or fence along the bottom of a page, and sketch the visitors looking at the exhibits.
Fantasy Ideas
Look at paintings in books and online for inspiration. See how artists have interpreted these themes. Bring traditional ideas into the 21st century. Get friends to model for reference photos – accurate anatomy and correct fall of light and shadow is important in creating a believable fantasy. Create scrapbook or sketchbook pages that suggest a story. Stain pages with tea or diluted ink, draw decorative borders and imagine a day spent with imaginary friends like dragons or witches.
Inspiration from Literature and Film
Have you ever read a description of a character or scene in a book that comes to life in your mind so clearly, that you can see it like a movie in your head? Try drawing it! If you love a book that’s been made into a movie, try to get the movie version out of your head, and read it afresh. Or try re-casting the scene with different actors.
Have you ever noticed your reaction to visual stimulation? Sometimes you see a photograph or painting, a sculpture or an object and your attention is immediately captured! For whatever reason, that piece of photograph or painting communicates with you and it is personal.
We all have our own personal adventures and experiences throughout our lives so when you see that print of a quaint outdoor coffee house, it may bring you back to that wonderful coffee house in Paris where you had your honeymoon. You may buy it just because it reminds you of a romantic moment.
You’ve heard before that when you look at a painting or sculpture, you try to see what the artist is trying to communicate, but from the viewpoint of a viewer, it’s not about what the artist sees, it’s about what it communicates to you and believe me, you can have two people looking at the same thing and their viewpoints will be different. Some people buy a painting because it has the right colours in it that match their furniture. Nothing wrong with that..Buy a print because you truly love it. Whether you purchase an original painting, print or poster you love, you will probably live with it or even pass it down in time to your children.
Throughout your life your décor will change many times, colour schemes will change many times, but your art will still be with you.
When you walk into someone’s home you get an overall feel for the people that live there and if you are left alone for a few minutes with no one to talk to because they are off to make you coffee, chances are your eyes would wander around the room and a good piece of art would grab your attention.
Even family portraits are great to look at. A great piece of art is the focal point in a room and your décor can be built around that. If all you know is a piece of art you love but have no design skills, fear not. There is help there too. If you cannot afford an interior designer, you can start by looking in furniture stores and seeing how rooms are put together, or you can look at model homes to get ideas. Surround yourself with beautiful art. After all, art is universal and good taste can be cultivated. Beautiful works of art like these not only accent your walls but also send a message and are powerful reminders that motivate us in good and bad times.
Looking Both Ways: Beth McCoy Evans’ Passage to Creativity
by Beth McCoy Evans
In a convergence of brilliant color and compelling visual narrative, Beth McCoy Evans reveals a batik-making method known as batik pointillism. Rich in detail and elegant composition, Evan’s works immerse us in a world of familiar depictions capturing natural beauty and simple humanity. Each time she creates a piece of art, she does it through trial and error ~ Jeannie Cotter, October 2009
Of all the art mediums I’ve dabbled in over the years- oil and acrylic painting mostly- drawing has been the constant and batik my passion. I first tried this beautiful, intriguing medium of batik in 1990 when I was designing and selling hand-painted apparel in my shop in Cuchara ,Colorado, in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. I began experimenting on clothing and table linens and was enthralled by the process and its results. A couple of years later, I saw some very realistic batik paintings in a gallery which moved me to take my work beyond simple decorative motifs. It was good to be able to fully utilize my drawing and painting experience and combine it with batik.
In my little studio nestled in among the pinion trees, I experimented intensively with wax and dyes. Living in rural Colorado, I did not have easy access to any batik classes or even anyone else doing batik. Fortunately, I learn best by trial and error (lots of error) so that every lesson is truly learned. I enjoy the challenge of bringing all of the facets of batik together, the drawing and planning, the waxing, the dyeing and the over-dyeing. Each is an art in itself. The element of surprise as the image begins to reveal itself with each successive dyeing still excites me. I find batik a lesson in patience, acceptance and the importance of process.
Always looking for new challenges, I began exploring batik pointillism in 2006. I’d long admired the painted works of the Neo-impressionists Seurat, Signac, and Cross. Division-ism is a general term to describe the separation of color and pointillism is the specific use of dots. The process involves “optical color mixing” rather than the physical mixing of the colors before applying them to the canvas. Pointillist paintings consist of thousands, if not millions of tiny dots (Seurat’s “Sunday in the Park” has 3,456,000 of them!) all mixed to a fuller range of tones in the eye of the beholder. I’m sure that the painters a century ago never got asked “is this done digitally?” Tiny dots of primary colors render the color on our computer and TV screens, and in any 4-color printing process, these can all be considered forms of pointillism. Or maybe in the 21st century the term”pixellism” might make more sense to people! I’ve adapted some of the scientific color theory used by these oil painters to my batik paintings and have been excited by the results and the luminous effects it creates. It is also a way to create subtle shading with batik without resorting to doing gradated dye painting. Instead of doing dots of oil paint I do dots of wax on the dyed cloth. For instance, an area of yellow and blue dots from a distance looks green. The further use of a few complimentary colored dots within that area intensifies the colors and light. It is a very slow process and takes much more time than other batiks that I do, but I find dotting quite meditative.
I begin by drawing my design on paper and then tracing it onto white Pima cotton with a black Cretacolor pencil which will come off completely in the final dry clean ,but not before. I then use a tjanting or a kistka to apply dots of a paraffin-beeswax mixture in the brighter areas of the image. The brightest areas get the most coverage, but are not fully filled in and the exceedingly darker areas get fewer and fewer dots, the dark areas getting none. In this first step, the bright and dark areas are already becoming delineated. I then apply ProMX dyes either over the entire piece or with a brush to certain areas. For example on the batik Jam & Oranges the first dye was very pale blue and I painted only the background, the cup,the jam, and the red and green jar lids, as this would influence their color later in the process. After the next waxing came a pale yellow dye on the lower part of the painting, the table, oranges, and jar lids. The bright spots on the table were dotted heavily with wax and the shadows less. The yellow over the blue jar lid gave me the lightest green. I painted more blue over the whole piece, wetting and avoiding the oranges and yellow jar lids. After that blue was dotted in, I dyed and waxed the bright yellow and then progressively worked my way through pinks, reds and purples to a deep navy and then to black, though the black is made up of mostly very dark purple and blue dots. When the reds were applied to the entire piece the background which had been previously dyed blue took on purple tones whereas the yellow under-dyed foreground took on peach and orange tones.
I feel as though I’ve only cracked the door on this technique and look forward to further experimentation in the use of the basic color theory and the use of different sized dots.
Currently I live with my husband , batik artist Jonathan Evans, between homes in the Southern Colorado Rockies and the Northern India Himalayas. Living in two such diverse locales and visiting new places in between provides great inspiration for my art and keeps my subject matter varied. I work mostly from the many photographs I take and I look for interesting shapes, shadows, and color combinations for my batiks.
Beth McCoy Evans exhibits her batiks and teaches adult and children’s classes in the US. and abroad. Visit her website at:www.batikartbybeth.comHYPERLINK “http://www.batikartbybeth.com/”
