Batik Art - My Precious Past

A scarf and a piece of cloth ready for sewing that is never going to happen. I used to make batiks few years ago when there were good dyes around in shops. They are gone, replaced by some new ones that give half of the color intensity of the old ones, and with that all the joy of making this craft has vanished for me. Anyway, I guess you can see that I liked Gustav Klimt, Egon Shiele and Paul Klee at that time a lot. I even tried to get the same motifs that Klimt had in his work but luckily (for both) didn't succeed, today I kind of like how it looks little naïve and deteriorated compared to those big art nouveau artists.

As for the Klimt's inspiration, I have especially this piece above on mind with its "round squares". At the time I intended to make a dress out of different batik pieces and put it together as a patchwork. I started and finished with this one (I realized it wasn't easy to get good matching colors from all the pieces). The thin brown edge was actually meant to be cut off, I was lazy to paint to the very edge and waste wax, but it turned out as a nice framing for the whole piece.

More nice Klimt’s

paintings right here.

The material is 100% silk, I painted with a bee wax mixed with paraffin and I used a brush. As for the actual method, I post here a manual from the only book I have about batik, Schöne Batik. Technik und Modelle by Karin Gumbiller from 1984. It is quite time consuming work, it always took me several days to accomplish a piece because it had to dry after each dyeing. I tried to sell them in the local designy gallery but luckily no one bought them.


And of course, I shouldn't forget to mention my mum again, because she, guess what, taught me all of that. She compiled her thesis at the Faculty of Education from batik pieces, she gave most of them away later as gifts to different people (grrrr!), only one nice picture stayed at home.

Coming soon: MORE batiks!