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I've been a full-time Batik artist since the late Sixties when,
as a primary school teacher, I experimented with wax and dyes in
the classroom with seven-year-olds. I moved to Ibiza in 1970 and
there started to make batik clothes to earn a living. This lead
quickly to painting wall-hangings and a first exhibition in Barcelona
in 1972. I continued my work in the States in the 80's where I lived
and worked all over the country. In 1982, I represented the USA
in the International Batik Show in Koln and showed my work at the
Textile Museum in Washington DC in 1985. During the past decade,
I have been around the world a couple of times, lived and worked
in Bali and bought a house in the Himalayas in North India, where
I currently live.
I have always used my batik paintings to record my life and adventures,
painting both the palm trees of the Pacific and the skyscrapers
of New York. I have just completed a series of portraits of my neighbours
in India, which I shall exhibit in 2005. Batik has often been treated
as a decorative medium but I have spent the past thirty years exploring
its tremendous potential as a representational art form. Over the
years, I have developed and refined a dye and wax-resist technique
which enables me to produce realistic imagery and to continually
redefine for myself, what may be achieved in this often under-rated
medium. Relying on meticulous drawing and planning, I underdye areas
of my paintings first and then go on to building up my images with
successive layers of dye and wax. I both paint and dip my cloth
in dyes in order to achieve a smooth gradation of my colour tones.
Its a slow process but I generally work on several pieces concurrently.
After doing this work for so long, I think I might be one of the
fastest tjanting workers West of Java!
At different times, I have taught batik classes,
most notably in the early 90's when I gave workshops in DC as
part of the Smithsonian
Museum Resident Artist Program. My crash course in Batik, "Become
a Batik Master in 3 Days" was particularly popular.
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Woman in
Green and Red
Ranjit Singh
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