Introduction Issue #1
DuniaMotif ART & DESIGN ONLINE MAGAZINE
BATIK HISTORY Preserving an Ancient Craft - The Art Of Batik
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ARTIST REVIEW Portrait of a Himalayan Village
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DISCOVER PEOPLE & PLACES Beyond Batik; Atma Alam Batik Art Village, Langkawi Malaysia
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About Us (Dunia - from Arabic “Dunya� - means World in Hindi, Bahasa and Swahili. Motif - a recurring or dominant element; a theme) is an on-line quarterly magazine focusing on contemporary and traditional design and particularly on the ancient art of Batik in its myriad forms.
We deal with both fine art and applied Batik as it develops in our multi-cultural and global society. Good design is good design, whether it occurs in nature or in man-made factory form and the two expressions are mutually dependent.
Batik covers all these worlds - from the very simple mud art of Africa, through the sophisticated fabric designs of Malaysia and Indonesia to the free expression of contemporary fine art throughout the world.
We will explore the worlds of fashion, of pure and applied design, of textile art and of cultural diversity whilst encouraging dialogue and commentary in a unique inter-active format.
Wherever and whenever the art and the designs ring true, DUNIAMOTIF Magazine will be there.
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the team & Contributors
Jonathan Evans
Michael Mrowka
Was born in England but has gone onto to live, work and exhibit his Batik Paintings on four continents. He has worked in the Batik medium for almost fifty years and currently lives and works in Colorado USA where he and his wife run Shalawalla Gallery.
Michael is co-owner of Lunn Fabrics, Ltd. in Lancaster, Ohio with his partner and wife, Debra Lunn. Together, they have explored many surface design techniques in depth, creating specialty fabrics for sale to the quilting community and one-of-akind fabrics for use in their own series of whole cloth and pieced arts quilts. Their fabrics are also for sale in their Ohio store. For the past 13 years, they have focused on pushing the boundaries of wax batik, creating 15,000,000 yards of batiks & handpaints for Artisan Batiks marketed by Robert Kaufman fabrics. They now spend many months each year in Java, Indonesia experimenting with new processes and pushing the limits of resist dyeing.
ON THE COVER A typical Sierra Leone bucket made from multicoloured recycled plastic. It is called tie-dye plastic. Top Image taken from www.fabricati.nl
DuniaMotif Team EDITORS Jonathan S. Evans Ummi Junid
Olena Korulyuk I was born in western Ukraine and I spent my childhood in Estonia, Belarus and on the Laptev sea coast of the Arctic Ocean. Today I live in a picturesque town called Poltava in central Ukraine. I’m a qualified architect. After graduation, I practiced architecture for 10 years. I’m a member of the Ukrainian Architects Union and I made my first attempts in Batik while working professionally as an architect. My work as an architect didn’t bring me enough art freedom and creativity, which my soul required, so Batik became my main work. My speciality is very evident in my subject matter and the rest is all up to my innate Ukrainian romanticism! Of course, first steps weren’t easy, but soon I managed to become a professional Batik artist. My first solo exhibition was called “The Tango of my City” and the second one was called “The Lace of my Dream”.
ASSOCIATE EDITORS Beth Evans Anita Nasir
Advertise With Us For all advertising enquiries please email: jonathanesvans@gmail.com ummijunid@gmail.com
Rudolf Smend Rudolf Smend is the pre-eminent authority and collector of traditional Indonesian Batik and has published many books on the art. Importantly, he has maintained the Galerie Smend in Koln, Germany since the early Seventies where he has exposed Europe to this Asian art medium. He has given every major European Batik artist an opportunity to exhibit their work and to teach their craft.
Disclaimer Reproduction of any article or pictures in Dunia Motif is subject to our approval. If you have any inquiries please write to us at: jonathansevans@gmail.com or ummijunid@gmail.com
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La La La Veta Land
The Art of Batik
Portrait of a Himalayan Village
Batik-Silk Art
Beyond Batik; Atma Alam Batik Art Village
Contents The Editor’s Note
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Preserving an Ancient Craft - The Art Of Batik
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Beyond Batik; Atma Alam Batik Art Village
Wax-Resist Dyeing With Caps How Modern Stamped Batiks are Made by Hand
Portrait of a Himalayan Village
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Batik - Silk Art
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LA-LA-LAVETA-LAND: Half Way Between Santa Fe And Obscurity
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Drying batik fabric under natural sun. Process and images provided by Lunn Fabrics.
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The editor’s note In
this very first Issue of DuniaMotif, the Online Art and Design Quarterly Magazine, we feature an article “PRESERVING AN ANCIENT CRAFT – THE ART OF BATIK” by Rudolf G. Smend. Rudolf Smend, from Koln , Germany is the Guru and World authority on Indonesian Batik. He has exhibited his definitive collection at Gallerie Smend in Germany as well as showing it often in the UK and the USA. His numerous books on the subject are well-known to Batik artists and Batik lovers the world over. Our first two featured Batik artists in this issue are Olena Korolyuk from Poltava in Western Ukraine and Jonathan S. Evans, an Englishman living in Colorado USA. Although their techniques and styles are wildly different, both artists produce some of the very best contemporary Batik paintings to be found today. Our lead article, “Beyond Batik” is a photo - essay of the work of Malaysian Batik artist, Puan Sada, whose modest and quiet approach to the difficult production of Batik fabrics is belied by the spectacular exuberance of her work. The fabulous horse batik on our front page is a splendid example of her batik paintings.
“Wax Dyeing with Caps” by Michael Mrowka is a photoessay explaining the tricky and lovingly exact process of making modern hand-stamped batik. Michael and his partner Debra Lunn, two American artists, live half their lives in Solo, Java where they turn out fresh, unique and original patterned fabrics for a fiercely competitive world market. And Jonathan Evans contributes an affectionate article on little arty town La Veta in Colorado USA, “La-La-La Veta Land” where things are not perhaps what they seem and where he and his wife, Batik artist Beth Evans, successfully run Shalawalla Gallery, the only Batik gallery in North America.
We hope that you will enjoy our first issue of DuniaMotif and take away an appreciation for contemporary and traditional Batik and that you will feel free to write to us with any ideas, suggestions and thoughts that we may have stimulated in you. We will publish any feedback you give us and hope to grow from any criticisms. Thank you from the Editorial team at DuniaMotif!
Written by : Jonathan Evans
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Preserving An Ancient Craft The Art Of Batik By Rudolf G. Smend
Handcrafted batik from Indonesia has recently been included on UNESCO’s world cultural heritage list. This accolade may finally go some way in ending the widely held and derisory view of the ancient technique of batik as a mere hobby. This complex art form has long had some devoted admirers in Germany and elsewhere. One of them is Rudolf Smend, founder of Galerie Smend in Cologne, who is also known for his enthusiasm for contemporary European batik art. His acclaimed collection of 19th and early 20th century Javanese batik was inspired by his travels to Indonesia and has been shown internationally.
winding alleys dotted with tiny oil-lamp lit guesthouses, enchanted him. There was a labyrinthine covered market, with diminutive elderly ladies in traditional dress – the batik sarong and lace kebaya – immaculately worn, with hair scraped into tight chignons. Delicious Javanese food, prepared at pavement warungs, was always available, and the town appeared to be teeming with gifted artisans, most silently batik makers” JH One of them, the young artist Gianto, had his studio in the Taman Sari area, the former water palace of the Sultan of
“Rudolf Smend is a man of subtlety, taste and integrity; a gallerist and collector; a bohemian and a gentlemen – it is impossible to pigeonhole him. He has run Galerie Smend, in the heart of old Cologne, for more than three decades (he opened it in 1073 with his wife Karin), exhibiting contemporary batik artists, costumes and textiles from Indonesia and holding seminars, workshop and teaching courses on both the craft of batik and painting on silk.
Yogyakarta. He invited Rudolf to stay and practice the technique. Soon Rudolf with his long red beard became an attraction in the area and other travellers were also motivated to learn this old technique.
He first visited Java in 1972. The hippy trail took him through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Malaysia but it was Indonesia that captured his imagination. Yogyakarta, with its sultan’s kraton, mesmerizing gamelan music and exquisite royal dancers, and its narrow
In actual fact, Batik is a wax-resistant dying technique used on textiles. The word batik is derived from the Javanese word ambatik, amba means writing and titik means point. This “point writing” is a test of patience”. The hot wax is applied layer after layer, then the material is dyed,
dried, and the wax melted off again. Then another layer of wax is applied, and every point and every line, no matter how small, is drawn by hand, and the dyeing, drying and wax removal process repeated. The first documentary evidence of the batik craft in Java dates from the 16th century. For some, however, portrayals of temple dancers in patterned sarongs on the reliefs of ancient Hindu temples are proof that people in Java have been practicing batik technique for more than 100 years. “In Yogyakarta, whilst finding local artists and material to exhibit, Smend formed strong friendships with major batik artists such as Ardiyanto, Amri Yahya, Bagong, Bambang Oetoro and Kuswadji. Staying at the hotel Asia Africa, he began collecting old batiks – bought from the delightful local ladies, the ibu ibu, who would appear in the cool of the late afternoon and spread out their wares on the covered verandas outside the rooms. Occasionally, something superb would appear, usually in the pastel tones typical of Pekalongan work on the north coast and made for the Peranakan Chinese community in the 1920s or 30s. The traditional soga brown and Indigo Central Javanese cloths were sometimes available apparent. At that point, the “Indische” school of the late 19th century was little known, but on an auspicious day in 1976, with the help of Ardiyanto, Smend acquired a batik sarong signed “van Zuylen” and another signed “Metzelar”.
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Both pieces are in his collection today, in addition to the work of J. Jans, a Dutch Indonesian batik designer, whom he considers the best of this important school.” JH Donald Harper, an American living in Yogyakarta, was a particularly influential friend. Having settled there in the alte 1970s, he became a connoisseur of Javanese culture, and a collector of fine antique textiles, many of which are now in the Smend Collection. The collection grew over the years and Cologne’s Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum held the first of several shows of the Smend Collection of Javanese batiks in 2000, entitled “Javanese and Sumatran Batiks from Courts and Palaces”. The Sultan of Yogyakarta, Hamengku Buwono X and his wife, her Royal Highness Queen Hamas, then travelled in Europe to the cities of Riga, Lodz, Krakow, Warsaw and Heidelberg, receiving acclaim along the way. During the World Batik Conference in 2005 it was shown at the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, MA. This became the second time batiks from the Rudolf Smend collection were shown in the USA. In 1984 The Textile Museum in Washington DC asked Rudolf for loans of batiks from the “Pasisir” (North Coast Java) area. The exhibition accompanied the launching of the book “Batik – Fabled Cloth of Java” by Inger McCabe Elliot, which features 14 batiks from the Rudolf Smend collection. In 2006 the Deutsches Textil Museum in Krefeld celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Batik exhibition of 1906 in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Museum. The Kaiser and his only daughter, Viktoria Luise von Preussen, were very interested in the subject of Batik. Queen Wilhelmina from the Netherlands had loaned a great part of her collection for the occasion of the batik exhibition to the Krefeld museum. On this occasion, it was Rudolf Smend, who loaned batiks from his collection for the exhibition. And for this event he published the catalogue “Batik -75 Selected Msterpieces”. From this selection one of the batiks was chosen by Jill D’ Alessandro, curator in the Department of Textile Arts at San Fransisco’s De Young Museum, for the exhibition “To Dye For: A World Saturated in Color”. Three batiks, published in Rudolf’s book have been acquired by the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris and are presented in the permanent exhibition.
“In the world of textiles outside Germany, Smend is a name synonymous with superb early Indonesia batik. He has never doubted the impotance of the medium, and handles individual pieces with real tenderness.” JH Recently two important catalogues have been published: “Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles” edited by Ruth Barnes and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg. The other one is “Life, Death & Magic” by Robyn Maxwell, from Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia. I find Robyn’s epilogue important for a wider audience, and asked her permission to cite one of the paragraphs. “By the final quarter of the twentieth century the Western modernist interest in textile and tribal art had embraced Southeast Asia. Artists and art collectors supplanted ethnologists in their interest in wooden sculpture, gold ornaments, intricate textiles and ancient bronze and ceramic heirlooms from remote mountain and island locations. Fine examples had been collected in the 19th and early 20th centuries by missionaries, colonial officials, adventures and scientists documenting the origins and development of human society. These are still the core works of the collections of the great ethnographic museums of Europe. In some nations of Southeast Asia, such as Indonesia, fine counterpart collections that encompass animist or tribal art were established that mirror those relocated to museums in the colonial motherland. Elsewhere an overwhelming obsession with the classical
Indianzed civilisations of the past meant that the tribal or “primitive” art of some parts of Southeast Asia was entirely overlooked and undervalued. In the 1960s and 1970s Southeast Asian art developed a new following. Alongside early Hindu and Buddhist sculpture there was a growing enthusiasm for animist art, especially from the outer Indonesian islands. Before long this interest by private, often youthful, travellers and collectors was matched by a new and different institutional interest, as art museums expanded their perceptions of what constituted Asian art – to Southeast Asia, to ancestral wood and to woven textiles. Fine private collections were assembled and exhibited, a number of which now form the basis of the Southeast Asian sections of major museums, with many aspects of the region’s animist art studied and published in a period of less than forty years. It is hoped that, in the twenty-first century, styles and forms of Southeast Asian art created over thousands of years to please the eyes of the living, to honour the souls of the dead, to worship ancestral deities and to placate spirits of nature will be venerated, not only by the communities whose forebears made this art, but by the rest of the region, indeed, the world.” RM
Texts cited: HALI: “Brilliant Batik and Profile Rudolf Smend” By Jonathan Hope (JH)
Rudolf G. Smend with his book
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Woman in Red and Green I could never get this sweet lady’s name but she would smile to me every time I went by her house in the village. There was a strange resigned sadness about her that I tried to capture and I liked painting all the beautiful textiles in the picture.
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PORTRAIT OF A HIMALAYAN VILLAGE By Jonathan S. Evans
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I arrived late on the scene in India but made up for lost time as fast as possible. I didn’t get there for the first time until 1987 but fell in love with the country immediately. It was exciting, different beyond belief from any other place I had ever been and somehow a place where I could most be myself. Acting on a friend’s advice, the first place I went to was Almora, then part of Uttar Pradesh and 250 miles North of Delhi where India, Nepal and Tibet all meet in a corner. On my next two trips to India, I travelled all over the Continent, but was always drawn back to this Kumaon area and to Almora, an old hill station. The spectacular Himalayan views, only 50 miles up the road, had exerted a strong hold over me and I found a small but select group of like-minded travelers living up there. In 1994, after another year there, I paid for a 75- year lease on a house perched on the edge of a tiny Himalayan village called Ayarpani, high on the side of Binsar Mountain and adjoining a Nature Preserve in what was
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now Uttarkhand state in the foothills of the Himalayas. I was the only Westerner living in the village. After spending more years there than I have spent anywhere else in my itinerant life, I am better known there than anywhere else I go. Ask for Jonathan in Almora town, more than 20 miles away, and any taxi driver can take you to my house. I have been a Batik artist since I was 25 years old, getting on for 50 years now, and have always been interested in portraiture in this tricky and challenging medium. Over the years, I have painted lots of portraits of friends and several self- portraits but it was not until I had a bad motorbike accident in Uttarkhand in 2002 that I really addressed portraiture. I worked myself out of ill-health and a potentially devastating personal situation by starting a series of portraits of the inhabitants of Ayarpani. Over a tenyear period, I must have painted over 50 portraits of my local friends and neighbours.
Portraiture in Batik is difficult. It is an incredibly precise and exacting process and I don’t know that I am any better at it than when I started. But I have painstakingly learned to come up with accurate drawings and to break down the different areas of skin tones and then somehow re-assemble these tones with dyes and wax to create a pretty good likeness. And these are people who have never had their portraits painted, let alone been photographed. They are thrilled to have the tiny attention that I can give them and love to be recorded in this way. Perhaps they feel that my paintings can give them a sort of immortality in their transient world. I include a small selection of what I consider to be the best of these portraits with a short description of the subjects and their stories. Their world is rapidly changing now as is India and the rest of the world. I have attempted to record a tiny part of this world before it vanishes forever.
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Watching Man Everywhere we Westerners go in India, there is one man or woman who says nothing but cannot take his eyes off us. He is quite fixated and seems to examine every detail of our faces, our clothes and even perhaps, our souls. He is not being rude as this kind of attention is familiar in India where personal space is rare. He just finds us endlessly fascinating as we do him.
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1. Harak Singh Despairs Harak, now sadly deceased but a regular on our scene, came from a family of crazy men. Probably bi-polar, he would often lose himself in a desperate despair and I photographed him one morning deep in despondency. I couldn’t resist adding the crude smiley face painted on the wall beside him in contrast.
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5. My Postman I remember my heart sinking as my local village postman turned up for his portrait one morning. The pattern on his carefully ironed shirt was impossibly complex but he looked as dapper as he always did, his moustache carefully groomed and his distinguished hair immaculate. He held my weekly mail and was happy to sit for most of the day while I drew him. It was a lot of work but came out quite well, I thought.
2. Mrs Than Singh Bhoj This is Than Singh’s long-suffering and even saintly wife. Her world has been wholly set in our village since she married her husband and she has always been suspicious of me because Than Singh sold me their house. In many ways, she is a tough old tribal woman but, as I have learned over the years, with a heart of pure gold. When my wife Beth arrived on the scene, she softened towards me and we ended up good friends finally before her death 4 years ago. Again, an era passes……
6. No Credit Please This is a portrait of Anand Singh, a proprietor of a local chai shop. The walls of the shop were adorned with posters and I particularly liked the way the camouflaged jacket of the soldier in the poster echoed Anand’s rather garish shirt.
3. Father and Son This is just a simple portrait of a local man and his son. They are relaxing in the sun, a family likeness quite clear. The son was more suspicious than the father and glared at me the whole time. Or maybe the sun was in his eyes. This is about as near to hyper-realism as I have ever achieved.
7. Mhan Singh the Clockman Mhan Singh, RIP, was Harak’s slightly more crazy older brother. For years, he was a familiar sight around the hills, wearing bright clothes, festooned with flowers and compulsively shouting out the time as it progressed through the day- like 1.57 and 14 seconds! even though he never wore a watch. In his lucid moments, he was friendly, even charming and spoke great English from hanging out with foreigners all his life. I’m afraid that the darkness got him in the end.
4. Old Kumaoni Man This time I went for a much looser feel to the portrait and was very happy with the slightly impressionistic treatment of the wax and dyes and in particular the rich colours and how they shone brilliantly in the sun.
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The Bride Another group portrait from a local wedding but this time, I thi (perhaps 15 or 16 years old) ripped from the bosom of her fam Women wept uncontrollably and I saw women literally rolling vanish from their world and go off to live in another. These occ expressed and exposed
e’s Family. ink that I managed to capture the agony of having a young girl mily and sent off to live in another town or village somewhere. g on the ground, sobbing, as they watched their darling sister casions can be very moving and I see emotions that are rarely d in our Western world.
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Old Kumaoni Woman and Grand children This came from a visit to the village below my house and was just a charming family group portrait. The old lady shaded herself from the sun while the kids looked at me with intense curiosity. 9. Than Singh Bhoj Ji. I bought my house in Ayarpani from Than Singh who took the money and promptly built a little shop next door to me. For years we were friends although he was a horrible drunk as many of the local Kumaoni men are. But he was always spiffily dressed, his moustache carefully trimmed and his clothes traditional and coordinated. After literally picking him up, dead drunk, out of the road many times, I finally had to let him go and keep him at a firm distance. But he is a typical local inhabitant, an old soldier who fought in three wars and has the scars to prove it. Nowadays, his age has passed and I am amazed that he is still alive and kicking, though I suspect not for too much longer, the way he treats himself.
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10. My Mechanic Rajiv is my motorbike mechanic in Almora. We don’t own a car there but usually get around on a scooter and I couldn’t stay mobile there without his knowledgeable attentions. I painted him standing outside his little garage, surrounded by old tires and trash looking as he always does I think, like fat Elvis. 11. Seven Women at a Wedding Local weddings are very popular events around our village and we are invariably invited. We usually take a large polished copper bowl as a traditional present and the gift of some money is always popular. This pictures depicts the intensity of the involvement of the guests as they watch one of their family go through the long drawnout ceremony before leaving their family and vanishing to the groom’s house forever. 12. Uncle Uncle is a perfect old intellectual Brahmin who gave me Hindi lessons for years and who manages to stay alive and active against the odds, apparently forever.
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Warm rain
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batik - silk art By Olena Korolyuk
Blind rain Batik- when you spell this word, you can almost sense the sweetish smell of wax. The process itself reminds one of doing a kind of ancient magic- tender cool silk, woven by thousands of gossamer threads, and drops of hot melted wax. I’ve been interested in Indonesian Batik for ages. But I dreamed of finding my own way, of combining some traditions of batik with new painting methods. At the beginning, I’d been painting on cotton, but then I switched to silk. Soft and gleaming, it allows you to have more freedom in technique, it allows the paints to flow fluently into one another, creating light watercolour effects. This is exactly what I try to achieve in my paintings. But the technique isn’t the main thing, anyway. If a viewer isn’t familiar with painting methods, the technique of an artwork won’t matter for him. He perceives the image in general. My main aim is to share with the viewer what concerns me and to find a response in his
Latin Cathedral
Oblivion
or her heart. It’s called “to pierce a soul with colour” Music always has been a major source of inspiration for me. In childhood I used to attend music school, and my favorite thing to do was to illustrate the compositions I played. Then I understood that I like art most of all and I started attending art school. And today it seems that I do what I used to do in childhoodlisten to music and paint. And I’m happy to be able to do what I love. As an architect, I love the city. That’s why there are a lot of cityscapes among my artworks. A city for me isn’t a pile of stones, but a living organism which has a soul. That soul is not open for everyone and not everyone wants it to be opened. My favorite city is Lviv, the place where my heart is. It is situated in western Ukraine and was the capital of the Kindom of Ruthenia, mysterious, architecturally lovely and exuding the same authentic Central European charm.
Lviv Tram
It attracts us with its quaint cobbled streets, bean-perfumed coffee houses and rattling trams.
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I like walking through its streets and I’m in love with its rainfall. The rain is as natural for Lviv as the fog is for London, as the Eiffel Tower represents and is the essence of Paris. Lviv rainfall awakens the feelings, makes us feel nostalgic and dream about unrealisable things. It forces us to aim for what is lost, to listen to each other and at the same time to stay alone. It is like dancing a tango. All these things constantly pulsate, change and are echoed in my works. And each of my paintings has its own fate, its own unique and unpredictable way of life. So for me, silk painting is a life itself. Each line, each movement of a brush, each colour shade remains deep in the fibers of which the fabric is made. As in the shortest episode of all life, the smallest part of a picture is unique. Spontaneity, exclusiveness, irreversibility – this links silk painting and life. That’s why I like this art medium.
Walk with me
Lviv. After rain
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Beyond Batik
Atma Alam Batik Art Village By Ummi Junid
www.atmaalam.com
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Puan Sada applying colors on her batik artwork Malaysia has a lot of interesting art throughout its different regions brought about by the influence of British colonialization on Indonesian heritage and culture. This unique combination has caused a wide variety of different arts, Batik being one of the most common textile and art forms. As a graphic artist, I have always been curious to understand the various elements inherent to the batik process. It is interesting to see how batik and its motif interpretations vary in different part of the world. For instance, the patterns of Batik Parang in Jogjakarta were created especially for the Sultan of Jogjakarta back in the Nineteenth century. They are considered classical motifs and their use forbidden except by the Sultan’s family, especially in central Java. Malaysian Batik has its own unique identity. Flora and fauna motifs are commonly associated with the pattern making. My aim is to explore Malaysian Batik as an art rather than as a fashion or textile statement. This has led me to meet one of the most passionate and self-taught Malay batik artists who have found a way to keep batik alive and moving forward. Puan Roshada or Puan Sada has been in the batik industry in Malaysia for almost thirty years. She started independently in Northern Malaysia, Pulau Langkawi. Located in Padang Matsirat, Puan and her husband both have backgrounds in the Arts. She worked closely with her husband, Azahari, who himself studied at a design college in Italy in the Eighties. Back then, he exhibited his Abstract oil paintings in several galleries. Learning from him, Puan developed an interest in art and brought that into her Batik practice. Each of them inspired the other and together they started up their independent Batik textile business in Langkawi.
Some of the products produced by Atma Alam Art Gallery
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Kuda Batik - Batik Horse painted by Puan Sada
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Hand painted and block print fabrics
Dipping chanting tool in hot wax
Chanting in progress
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atik making is considered one of the most time-consuming and complicated processes to work on. From choosing a suitable fabric, stretching the cloth and applying different layers of dyes and waxes, a meter of cloth can take at least a week to complete. Every element of the design needs careful planning before the work with wax tjanting tools can be started. The more elements the artist decides to incorporate, the more layering and coloring must be done so that it takes enormous amounts of time, energy and persistence to complete each piece of batik. The motifs in Puan Sada’s batiks usually signify harmony and tranquility. Her art generally portrays animals and flowers which have a strong significance in Malaysia and evoke positive relationships between these elements. The artist usually works from the top of the cloth downwards so that the flow of the design is consistent. The symmetrical of each motif drawn gives the fabric a natural balance. Most of her batik paintings will be used in sarongs which is why she works as perfectly as possible. Obviously the color applied determines the quality of the pieces of fabric. Wet dyes applied to cloth will dry to a different tone and this must be always taken into account by the artist. The strength of the dyes will determine therefore the contrasting colors in the cloth. It is clear that the artist must have a sense of the finished design before starting his or her work. Besides painting flowers and animals, Puan Sada loves to explore some abstract motifs. She sometimes likes to just throw colors onto the fabric and see how the art evolves itself within that space. She lets her emotions take control and that’s how she finds peace and happiness as an artist. When asked about the response from the public to her abstract Batiks, she replied that, in country she lives in, not everyone appreciates art and not many understand it. Often her art involves the viewers’ self-exploration and is primarily for personal collections but she also makes Batik fabrics for clothing, bags, scarves, soft kids’ toys and even shoes.
The humble batik artist in her gallery
Set of chanting tools
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Zig Zag Double Cap Dotty Dot - LunnFabrics
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WAX-RESIST DYEING WITH CAPS
How Modern Stamped Batiks are Made by Hand Artist : Michael Mrowka - Artisan Batiks - Lunn Fabrics
www.lunnfabrics.com
Debra Lunn and Michael Mrowka standing in front of the final result. The dark brown spots were protected by the wax and maintained their color, while the areas around the spots now have a lively color/texture. Modern stamped batik came into being to reduce the extremely high prices for traditional hand-drawn wax batik. I lovingly call modern stamped batik, “Fast Food Batik”. It is beautiful, desirable, and delicious, but on a very different level compared to traditional hand-drawn wax batik which is like a 5 course meal. Since we began designing modern batik
for quilt artists and fiber artists with western taste, we have adopted nonIndonesian motifs and colors which are more desirable for quilters. We have discovered that Indonesians also like our non-traditional colors and motifs.
smocking and color. Smocking, is the pleating technique- it can be linear or random and there are many smocking patterns and ways to achieve them. With smocking, more interesting textures may be achieved.
There are unlimited variations that can be used in smocking the fabric, making the first layer of color on the fabric, the wax stamping, and the last layer of
This is only one of the combinations of technique, smocking, color and motif. You can follow the basic idea of “Wax Resist Dyeing with caps” from this article.
The Steps of Making Modern Wax Batik
1 A 15 yard piece of white cotton fabric is dipped in a dark brown fiber reactive dye. After being saturated, the excess dye is allowed to drain by hanging on the crossbar.
View video version here
2 The fabric, damp with dye is smocked by hand to create a uniformly random result.
4 After smocking and dye application, the fabric is pulled into the hot sunlight on top of a long piece of oilcloth to cure.
3 Additional darker colors are added with squirt bottles for a more complex result.
5 During the curing/drying process, soda ash is sprinkled on top of the fabric for additional texture.
6 After the fabric is fully dried, it is saturated with waterglass fixative, wrapped in plastic and allowed to cure for at least 2 hours.
8 The colored fabric is now stamped with wax using a handmade stamping device called a cap (pronounced chop). The cap is made from copper to match the artwork that we provide.
10 Each time the wax is stamped on the fabric, it must be freshly dipped into the hot wax so the wax deposit is uniform.
7 After rinsing the waterglass from the fabric, it is again dried before the next process.
9 The wax seals the fabric and color where it is deposited. The wax will “resist� the action of the bleaching process and the second coloring process. The fabric must be stamped carefully so the pattern aligns correctly. Each yard of fabric must be stamped 30 times with the hot wax.
11 The hot wax pan is on the left, the fabric to be stamped is hanging on the right of the table, and the already stamped fabric is piled up under the table. The table is specially constructed to provide a slightly damp surface so the fabric can be pulled up without the wax sticking to the table.
12 This is a close up of the fabric piled under the table. The darker brown spots are where the wax has been stamped.
14 As the bleaching chemicals work, the brown color can be seen getting lighter.
16 The fabric is re-dampened so the smocking will hold its shape. We do not bleach the fabric to white starting with a brown which is so dark. Too much bleaching will harm the strength of the fabric.
13 The stamped fabric is dipped into bleaching chemicals to remove the color where the wax is not covering/protecting it.
15 The bleaching process is stopped, the fabric is rinsed and again hung to dry.
17 After the fabric is smocked again, 4 different colors of yellow, orange, rust, and light brown are added on top with sponges. Where the wax protected the dark brown color from the bleaching, it now protects from the new colors being added.
18 The fabric is again pulled out into the sun, and sprinkled with soda ash.
20 As the fabric dries it changes dramatically in color. It tends to dry first at the edges as seen here.
19 The white specks of soda ash can be seen here on top of the yellow, orange, rust, and light brown that were just added with sponges.
21 The fabric must be fixed with waterglass again, and then the wax can be boiled off of the fabric as shown here.
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LA-LA-la LAVETA-LAND:
Half way between Santa Fe and Obscurity By Jonathan S. Evans
When I was a young kid of twelve or thirteen, I discovered the sci-fi short stories of Ray Bradbury. He wrote about some mythic small town America where tiny wooden houses nestled together on dusty streets, where everyone knew everyone else and where the local folk liked nothing better than to sit in their rocking chairs on their porches in the gathering gloom and breathe in the summer air whilst sipping iced tea and contemplating the emerging stars above. It all sounded idyllic to me. But unfortunately, in Bradbury’s science fiction stories, as the shadows grew longer and darkness fell, all was not what it seemed; shapes shifted and twisted, strange dark forms flitted from garden to garden and at night, the true small town inhabitants, the aliens, took over. When my wife Beth and I bought a house and gallery in tiny La Veta in Southern Colorado fifty years later, I figured that I had finally found my small town America. And I discovered that Ray Bradbury’s stories were perhaps metaphorical. Roughly half-way between Denver, the capitol of Colorado and the great art center Santa Fe in New Mexico, La Veta nestles in the Rocky Mountains. This little town lie in Cuchara Valley below East and West Peaks, the Wahatoya of Native American legend, the site of tribal neutral
ground, where the weather was believed to originate and where little seemed to have changed in the past 150 years. La Veta started as a fort in the 1850’s, became a trading post and later a depot for the new railways crisscrossing the new Western frontier. A herd of fearless fifty or sixty deer roam freely around the town’s unpaved streets and during the warm summer months, black bears can be seen at night as well as the occasional
mountain lion. Our street, Ryus Avenue, in the center of town, was originally a small area of bars, hotels and brothels, actually the town’s red-light district, servicing the new arrivals to the town. Of course, all that has changed now and Ryus Avenue is now home to three art galleries, the town bakery, a Quilt retreat, the La Veta Art School and the La Veta Inn which unfortunately is closed and up for sale. But La Veta still only has about
800 permanent residents- perhaps 100 of them are artists, musicians or writersalthough the population swells to a couple of thousand in the summer when second home owners escape the heat of the south and take over the town. La Veta is in many ways a classic small town anywhere; everybody knows everybody, everybody has been married to everyone else at one time or another (I exaggerate here) and there are few secrets between people. It is both cosy and reassuring, safe and charmingand slightly claustrophobic like any other small town in the world, I suspect. People often do not bother to lock their doors, there are always parking spaces for the traffic and La Veta manages to boast one of just about anything, although at this point, more galleries than anything else. We have one grocerythe long established Charlie’s General Store, a bank, a great library with a fabulous DVD collection, a gym, a good second hand bookshop, a wine bar, a delicatessen, a coffee bar, three gift shops, three realty offices, an excellent bakery, a couple of restaurants and two garages. There are large murals painted on walls all over the town. Several days a week in the summer, a train brings tourists into town from Alamosa, west of us. We are chronically short on
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La Veta Baptist Church
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Old Stone Barn
Children’s Mural
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Carved wooden bench
accommodation, unfortunately, which limits tourism but we boast two RV parks, rental cabins and a popular B n’ B. My wife can recall a time when there were 12 bars serving liquor between La Veta and Cuchara, the tiny community above the town but as the community has aged and habits have changed, we are now down to 3 or 4. There are still plenty of ranchers living around the town and cowboys are still to be seen but times are changing and La Veta is now an emerging tourist and art gallery center. Mind you, the town seems to progress by three steps forward and two steps back and goes through cycles of poverty and prosperity, especially since the ski resort, never very successful, closed 15 years ago. But we all live in hope and the tourists keep coming back each year. The mountains around, especially the famous Sangre de Cristos, attract hikers every year as well as hunters during season. This is wonderfully unspoiled land and something most inhabitants of the area appreciate and enjoy.
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These days, art and the Great Outdoors is mainly what brings visitors to the little town and although, thankfully, La Veta will never become like the better-known Taos in nearby New Mexico with its 70 plus galleries, it is getting a reputation for good art of all kinds. Our gallery, Shalawalla Gallery, is the only Batik gallery in the USA and that, combined with the strong presence of quilters here, (Judith Baker Montoya and Ricky Tims, who owns and operates the next door Quilt retreat and is the rock star of world quilters) gives La Veta the reputation of being a Fiber Art center. We teach Batik to an increasing number of students every year and that brings more people into the area. Shalawalla (Hindi- Shawl Guy) Gallery is both a gift shop specializing in imported Indian textiles, scarves and shawls, jewelry from all around the world and local pottery and a Batik gallery exhibiting the batik paintings of Beth and Jonathan Evans. It is situated in an old train boxcar, in the middle of town and across the road from the town park, and has just celebrated its fourth year of business and is going strong.
Children’s Mural
Visit the gallery>>
Original Adobe House
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Old Plough
Historical Mural