Batik - what is it?

Recently, I mentioned batik to a student and got a blank stare — or the equivalent. So I thought I'd blog about it.

Wikipedia defines batik as "a cloth that is traditionally made using a manual wax-resist dyeing technique." When I use the term, I am referring to the process, not the product. Cloth using this process is traditionally associated with Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, China, Azerbaijan, India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, and Singapore, but I first encountered a "batik factory" in St. Kitts in the Caribbean.

The process consists usually of 2 or more applications of color to a piece of cloth with liquid wax applied in between to the dry fabric. That is, the artist applies a wax design to the fabric, lets the wax dry, then immerses the fabric in a vat of dye color. Then the fabric is totally dried and the next application of liquid wax is applied. This can go on to many colors, but usually I think the cloth is restricted to 2 or 3 colors.

Some artists have modified the process by using colored wax (like wax crayons) and/or painting on portions of the fabric.

Some years ago, I did a series of batik panels and found the process incredibly tedious. But the results were spectacular!

After you've completed all the color applications, you must remove the wax. In  batik "factory" I believe they use kerosene. An alternative for the home artist, and one that I used, is to place the completed piece between thick pads of paper towels and use a hot iron to liquify the wax. After this is complete, there is still some residue, so, if the art work is to be used as a wearable item, it would need further treatment. In my case, I simply mounted the batik on white backing and framed as I would a watercolor.

One thing that is interesting about the process is that you have to think backwards. For instance, if you want to have some white in the final piece, you have to apply wax to the areas that will be white first. Then, you need to chose your colors carefully, because any color that hasn't been waxed will combine with subsequent applications of color to make a combined color.

For example, here's a batik piece I made called "green-eyed woman."

And here's the "color design" that I worked out for this piece.

 

And here's a piece called "flutist," also done at this time.

I think the process produces spectacular results. It is very time consuming, however.

 

Boy and Granddad by Phyllis Simard

Boy and Granddad by Phyllis Simard

This is a painting (yes, a painting) done by a student of mine, Phyllis Simard, in acrylic (yes, acrylic). It's done from a photo with some editing of content to enhance the composition. I think it's very impressive and wanted to share it with you. The style is reminiscent of Norman Rockwell, who painted more than 300 covers for the Saturday Evening Post.

Rockwell was looked down upon by some in the "Fine Arts" community as a "mere illustrator" until after his death when the pendulum swung and his body of work was recognized as art. Too late for Rockwell, but Wikipedia remarks that he didn't mind being called an illustrator. It's what he called himself.

I would encourage all my students: follow your personal dreams. There will always be people who make less of them; you are the one who can make them come true.

Color attributes and their relationship

A rough color value scale

I have often heard the plaintive cry from students that "I just don't know how to mix color." So I decided to offer a course in color theory, and I'm currently running a class of 8 students at the Reston Community Center. The major attributes, and those we're doing exercises on first, are hue, value, saturation and temperature.

I realized yesterday, from a student's question, that the relationship between these attributes is sometimes not well understood. For instance, "hue" refers to the quality that distinguishes red from green from blue. But hue refers to the saturated color: pure red, pure blue, etc. So a grey or a beige is a color but not precisely a hue. It's a neutral. In tinting or shading a pure hue, you're always going to affect that hue to some degree. Addition of white always cools the color. Addition of an analogous color (such as adding yellow to red to lighten it) changes the hue. Adding black or a complement to darken the hue brings it off the outside of the color wheel and it becomes a neutral.

Also, the beginning student may not realize that the neutrals include not only "grey" in various values from white to black, but warm and cool greys, beige, and the whole spectrum of neutral and partially neutral shades and tints.

When I'm having the class do an exercise to establish the "home value" (or basic value) of a hue (red, for instance, is considerably darker when applied as a fully saturated hue than yellow) against a grey scale, The hue will be modified  as to its value, saturation and even temperature as we lighten and darken it.


What splendor we can add to our paintings if we understand and can work with all the attributes of color.

Mixing Blacks

I have for some time omitted black from my palette and have depended on mixing blacks and grays using complements or near complements. My favorite combinations to date have been 1) ultramarine blue and burnt sienna and 2) (when I have green on my palette) Thalo green and alizarin crimson. I have so far not found a combination on the yellow-purple complement that I care for as "black" (although I've gotten some good muddy colors), but I assume that I just haven’t found the correct combination. Yellow is so light a value that any combination with purple that gets close to neutral tends to be too light for a rich black. This could probably be remedied by selecting one of the dark yellow neutrals such as raw sienna or yellow ochre rather than high-hue yellow.

By the way, a student asked me the other day if I was familiar with “Payne’s Grey” so — curious as to what its mineral components were — I looked it up. It turns out that (according to Wikipedia) Payne’s Grey is simply a mixture of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue. So now you don’t need to go out and buy Payne’s grey.

But I wrote a poem with a Payne’s grey sky in it some time ago, and I include it here:

It’s a Payne’s grey watercolor sky,

blotted clouds grumbling in anticipation.

Somewhere it’s started to rain.

I will weep, weep with the rain

which hurricanes my heart’s ache

descending in typhoons.

Strong trees may break

before this is over.

It is a long slow rain,

flooding the path to the house.

In a distant land, men are fighting.

I will weep with the rain

for their lost lives.

        Exercise: If you  have old tubes of paint lying around or you don’t mind the expense of trying new colors, here are some possible colors to try mixing for blacks and greys. A familiarity with and ability to mix various blacks and grays will give your paintings more richness.

1)      alizarin crimson and thalo green.  (Also try any magenta or cool red with assortment of greens.)

2)      cadmium orange and cobalt blue. (Also try other orange and blue combinations. Try also blues with warm browns – which are actually dull oranges.)

3)      Indian yellow and dioxazine purple. (Also try raw sienna and other yellow-browns with purples.)

Quinacridone Magenta

OK. First of all, Quinacridone? What a funny word.

Wikipedia says "Quinacridones are a family of synthetic pigments used to make high performance paints. Quinacridones are considered "high performance" pigments because they have exceptional color and weather fastness." The Wiki article is brief and interesting, but I didn't find any origin of the word.

in my last post I stated that I was going to change my basic palette to include Quinacridone red instead of Alizarin Crimson. Having ordered Q. Red from a color chart, I found that the red is a bit too warm, and that Quinacridone Magenta is more nearly the "cool" red (slightly bluish-red) that should be used in place of Alizarin. The WIki article on Alizarin is also of interest.

Why I recommend a 6 primary-color palette

I have a lot of half-used paint tubes in my studio, but some years ago, when I started teaching, I limited my palette to 6 primary colors and burnt sienna (and large tube of titanium white, of course.)  Why?

Well, a primary reason is that paints are expensive, and a certain percentage of my students were approaching painting for the first time. I didn’t want their first venture to be ugly because of the cost.

In addition, I had just read Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green by Michael Wilcox.

If you limit your paints to one each of red, yellow and blue, this limited palette may disappoint you. In theory, the “primary” colors should easily make all the colors on the palette by mixing. But commercial paints aren’t exact primary colors. Looking at the exercise shown at the right, notice that the purple and the green (secondary colors) aren't very bright. You will get better results if you have two of each primary color. 

 

The basic theory is that the color wheel as a whole has a warm and a cool side and each color has an inclination to be warm or cool. For instance, lemon yellow is cooler than cadmium yellow.

Since I need to replenish my oil paints in my personal kit anyway, I began looking at my choices to see if I could identify a more optimum selection of colors than I had been using.

The palette I had been using included: zinc yellow, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, alizarin crimson permanent, ultramarine blue, Phthalocyanine (Thalo) blue, and burnt sienna. Zinc yellow, while it is a very cool yellow, I found to be a very weak color, easily overpowered in mixing with any other color. The cadmiums are getting outrageously expensive. Thalo blue (or Prussian, which is essentially the same) is a very strong and staining color and easily overpowers other colors on mixing. But I haven’t found a good substitute for Thalo or Prussian yet.

I am changing my basic palette to: Hanza yellow light, Hanza yellow medium, Napthol red, Quinacridone red, ultramarine blue, and either Prussian or Thalo blue (because I can’t find a good substitute for this color.)Hanza is a substitute for Cadmium yellow. Cadmiums are opaque. Hanza has some translucency and is said to mix well to form secondary colors and tints.  Burnt Sienna stays on the palette because it’s essentially a shade of orange, but darker, so it’s easy to mix it with ultramarine blue to make a rich dark.

I did some comparison because I’ve been trying to get alizarin off the palette for many years without success. I learned long ago that alizarin is a “fugitive” color. (That means that it tends to fade.) On the other hand, it’s a very transparent color and is good for glazing. It also mixes well with thalo green to create a rich black. However, some years ago, manufacturers came out with Permanent Alizarin Crimson and I thought they had it handled. But NoooOOOooo. The result was sort of dull and dirty. I wasn’t happy but I didn’t think that I had a choice. Recently, a representative from Golden Acrylics mentioned that Quinacridone Red (in acrylics) is a good substitute for alizarin. Well, I’m switching to Quinacridone Red in both my oil and acrylics palettes.

I did a little experiment (shown at left) to determine the differences between some of the reds in my oil kit. I suggest that you try such comparisons at home. And if you can pick up old tubes of paint rather than buying every color off the shelf, you’ll find that oil lasts quite long in the tube. (Acrylics last somewhat less long, but their shelf life seems to be improving. 

 

Now, to come back to the question: why do I recommend a 6-color palette?  Well, I know of one artist who says he puts every color in his kit on the palette every time he paints. He says he uses 72 colors.That’s a lot of preparation. In addition, it uses up a lot of space on the palette that could be used for blending. And, as you can mix any color with the right primaries, putting more seems like overkill.

But some people just like to buy paint, and if that’s you, why go ahead. You’re obviously not alone. Manufacturers keep putting out new colors.

What is composition?

Every once in a while, a student asks me: "What is composition?" Or, "How can I know if I have a good composition?"

Composition, as it applies to the visual arts, most closely means combining the elements of art to produce the effect you want. Basically, art is a communication. And the basics of art include line, form, value, color, and ways of representing depth. So the student needs to develop proficiency in the basics, and to the degree that he has that and knows what he wants to communicate, he will have proficincy in composition.

The work of art is a communication, so it will have a different impact on each viewer. You, as artist, never totally control the effect. But you can put together the elements of art so that the communication received by the viewer approaches what you wished to say.

You will find there are many "rules" of composition. Just do a search on the internet and you will find lots of advice. Take notice, but don't allow yourself to be limited by any of the rules. Remember, these are not "physical universe" rules, like the law of gravity. They can be broken.

Your goal in painting is to combine the elements of art so they form a unique and satisfactory composition.

I've been attending a weekly drawing group and wanted to share with you two recent drawings, one being what I would call a "study" and one being a "composition." The study could be complete enough to call it a composition, but you can see that, in the composition, I was more conscious of how the figure interacted with the space, so that the space itself becomes more of an active part of the composition.

Sheila - Study

Lize - Composition

What is a study?

Recently a student asked me "What is a study?" North Light Dictionary of Art Terms defines a study as "a drawing or painting  of a section or of a whole composition, usually detailed more carefully than a sketch." Charles Sovak in his book Oil Painting, Develop your Natural Ability (recommended)  says, "remember, no matter how beautifully you paint an object, it remains a mere study until it is artfully incorporated into a composition."

Study of a box by Pam Coulter

I think the distinction between "study" and "finished composition" has been somewhat blurred. Consider the fact that Monet painted "Impression, Sunrise" very quickly, generating the name of a whole artistic movement: Impressionism. It was hardly a finished composition in the sense that the "Old Masters" thought of it, so it was a study. Plein air painters today often follow the impressionist lead in the matter, finishing a painting in one session and on site. A study can be so attractive that it rivals or surpasses a finished work. Because of it's freshness and immediacy, it has charm. 

But, ok, what is a composition? (Is it unfair to end with a question?)

Ego and the Artist

I’ve sometimes heard it said that the artist has too much ego.

What is ego? Well, it’s a word that originally — in Latin — simply meant “I”. But it was borrowed by Sigmund Freud to represent a concept of self, and is often used in a derogatory sense as egotism, which "characterizes an exaggerated estimate of one's intellect, ability, importance, appearance, wit, or other valued personal characteristics." In other words, ego became identified with selfishness or the failure to take others’ interests and well-being into account.

Looking back over my long career, when I was young, I had a lot of “ego,”a strong sense of personal worth. I say that now, because at the time I had little to show in terms of finished art, simply a sense of greatness. And so I may well have been seen as having an ego, in the bad sense.

 But I would encourage my students and artist friends to develop a strong sense of self-worth. First, it’s a bulwark against those who are so afraid of surviving that they would put down anyone with creative ability. Secondly, you probably ARE great; you just need the time to develop a body of work. Third, how are you going to make your work known to others if you, yourself, have been persuaded not to promote your self-worth? 

Life can be discouraging. Art is fun. Fill the world with art and encourage others to do so.

Here’s a painting I completed recently:

Floral with brown pitcher

An alternate grey

I follow the blog of Qiang Huang, who paints little jewel-like paintings. In a recent post, he remarked: "I have found that "transparent brown oxide" (Winsor and Newton) and ultramarine blue makes a wonderful gray." Both are transparent colors. This would be an interesting combination to try. Here is the post where he shows the use of this grey.

On a subsequent day, he tried a different combination of colors to make the grey warmer. Here's his comment:

"I felt the gray I used yesterday is a little too cool. So today I tried a new combination: transparent oxide yellow + ultramarine blue. I like this one better. It made the background warmer." You can see his painting on his blog.

I find the use of complementary colors (or near complements) rather than "tube" black for mixing greys fascinating. There's a painter, William Wray, who uses greys and neutrals to maximum effect. I love his cityscapes.