Aaahhh...I'm back to silk painting. I haven't painted on silk since August. Silk painting is like a drug and if I go too long without doing it, I start having withdrawal symptoms. I'm making up for the hiatus this week. So far, I've finished this one, painted two freeform scarves 14" x 72" and have put the resist on another silk that is the same size as this one.
My intention when I started this painting was to do a background that had leaves painted without resist so that they would be fuzzy and give a sense of foreground and background but after painting the flowers and leaves I felt that giving it a plain black background would give it a dramatic, more graphic quality. Once I had that in my mind, I knew that if I tried to do the dimensional looking background I would probably mess it up because my heart wasn't into it any longer. I was also afraid to use the black because my resist lines on this were really thin because my bottle of resist was almost gone and it was a little thicker than usual and I used a really small tip to apply it. Usually that means that I'm going to have lots of places where the resist didn't fully penetrate the fabric and the dyes will break through. The scarf would have been ruined if the black broke into the yellow flowers. Also, sometimes when steaming the silk after it's painted, the dyes migrate to places where they shouldn't be. I was lucky neither of those things happened and I'm very happy with the finished piece. This can be worn as a scarf but I like to frame the square silks because I have so much labor into them and they look really good hanging on the wall. Some of the tactile beauty of the silk is lost behind the glass but I use the glass because I want them to be protected.
Silk Clivias
Image Size 21" x 21"
Silk dyes on silk
Unframed
$425.00
