Jonathan S. Evans

Artist self portrait

Artist self portrait

 

TRIALS, TRIBULATIONS AND OCCASIONAL TRIUMPHS IN THE BATIK TRADE

by Jonathan Evans & Lee Creswell

When I first saw Jonathan Evans’ batiks I was spellbound by the beautiful subtle layers of tonation. It certainly “wowed” me into asking “how did he do it”? He spent years on batik and is now a celebrated artist worldwide.  Instead of interviewing him, I left him to narrate his thoughts on his world of batik. ~ Lee Creswell, July 2009

I first came across batik as a young teacher in the Oxfordshire school system in the UK in the late Sixties. A fellow teacher returned from a holiday in Malaysia with a small painting on cloth, which had an unusual quality, a fine veined cracking across it and muted graded colours. And it wasn’t really a painting as, when I turned the cloth over, I realised that the same picture was on the other side.  The cloth had been dyed right through and my friend explained briefly to me that the process was called batik, an ancient technique achieved through the use of melted wax and cold water dyes. That was all he could tell me about the process but I worked out right away how the picture was created. I looked at the painting and worked backwards from point B to point A easily. I instantly figured out that to achieve this effect you had to start with a relatively clear idea of the finished picture, draw it and then apply successively darker dyes to the cloth, using the wax to separate and save the dye colours as you progressed. You’d have to start with white or very light coloured cloth and black would have to be the final dye put on.

Bingo! A light went on for me. I loved the idea of the technique straightaway, the building up a painting using different colours, and the interaction of different colours to produce another.

I remember doing my first batik in the classroom with seven year olds; we all brought in old plain-coloured T-shirts, I rounded up some cheap coldwater dyes, paint brushes and candles and we spent a messy afternoon painting peace signs, skulls and crossbones or our names on the T-shirts. I found a friendly drycleaner to take the wax off for us and we were in business, or at least in the business of education.  But I didn’t stay in that business for very long; teaching could be very frustrating and at twenty five, I was realizing that I had itchy feet and that I didn’t want to remain a teacher for the rest of my life. So, when my early marriage ended, I took off to live in Ibiza where a friend had gone a few years before and wrote to me about magical mountains, full moon parties and amazing sunsets.

Although I’d lived in East Africa as a child and had seen quite a bit of Europe, my travel started with that short step away from the UK to the Spanish Mediterranean and in a real sense, I’ve never looked back. The land beyond the immediate mountains has eventually always looked more appealing than the current one; my life has been one of travel and of living and settling in different countries. And the art of batik has enabled me to have such a life; it has given me a fabulous freedom and a reason to travel and an identity that no other profession could have ever given me. At times, struggling to market this obscure art form, it has been a curse; at other times, it has opened doors that I never even knew existed.

The first thing that I had to do when I landed on the island of Ibiza was to find a way to support this new lifestyle; I tried different art mediums to try and finance my life on the island. I tried making crystal glass mobiles, painting in water colours and doing linocut prints; with my new Spanish partner, Marie Luz, I painted Easter eggs at Easter, tried wood block-printing clothes and eventually made some simple batik shirts. It was while I was teaching English to a Spanish senora who owned a clothes boutique, that my way became clear. She saw what I was doing, had never seen or heard of batik before (it was quite unknown in Spain in the Sixties and Seventies- and still may be, for all I know) and asked me to batik some shirts for her shop. They sold immediately, terrible though they probably were, and I never looked back. So in a very real sense, my early career as a batik artist was based in commerce. All I knew was that if I was going to be a full-time artist, it had to pay its way.

I spent the next eight years between Ibiza and Barcelona, working like a maniac, learning the process, trying out new techniques and graduating from batik clothes to batik paintings. I sold at the infamous Hippie Market where we used to squat like monkeys in the dust for the entertainment of German tourists and in a wonderful co-operative shop called Happy Valley owned by an American friend of mine. I did several batik shows at galleries and shops in Barcelona and, although I survived, I never seemed to get very rich doing it. But I learned how to use a canting expertly and to alternate between dipping the cloth into pots of dye and applying the dyes with a brush directly in order to achieve more control of the medium. The paintings became increasingly complicated and this period was invaluable in figuring out what was and what wasn’t possible in the medium.  Basically, I came to realise that the only limits that batik had were those which my mind imposed on the medium. Anything was achievable if it was conceivable; my technique improved to take in much more sophisticated subject matter and effects.  I learned about graduation dyeing, lowering a batik piece into a pot of dye and drawing it out slowly so that parts of the cloth were, subtly, a stronger colour than others. I learned how to take a drawing apart, tone by tone, and reconstruct it using increasingly strong dyes. I painted the fincas, the terraces, the hills and the beautiful skies of Ibiza and even tried a few portraits, as it was people that really interested me.

In the late Seventies, a friend took a bunch of slides of my work to New York and quickly called me to say that a big interior decoration shop had seen my work and wanted to buy a large number of them for the store. I was to come to New York and work out the details there. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. I loved the country from the very beginning; I had always loved the music that America had contributed to world culture, jazz and rock. Of course, the Sixties had changed the social and cultural landscape forever but it was still America that I saw as representing the cutting edge of global change whilst still nursing all the errors of pre-war society.

Predictably my deal with the interior decoration store fell through completely but I was in America and there I stayed for the following ten years without leaving the country. I threw away my return air ticket and after some truly desperate times in New York when I was totally broke, crashed on friends’ floors and was one small step away from living on the street. I found a huge loft at Times Square and got back into serious batik painting again. America was a vast country, full of endless possibility and opportunity, I figured, and my English accent worked wonders in almost every situation. Sometimes, I just had to open my mouth to get admiring responses. So, an Englishman in New York, I was fascinated by the buildings and the architecture, by the abstract shapes, endless glass and by the reflections that the buildings made in one another. I started to paint complex batiks of my new environment, work which started out as very representational cityscapes but soon became rather abstracted, though I have never really convinced myself with my abstract work. I’ve always been basically a representational artist and have tried to inject something new and something of myself in all my work. I had a joint show in Greenwich Village within six months and a big solo show at a new gallery in southern Manhattan within the first year. The latter show miraculously sold out and I took a year out to travel around the States to see more of the country, hanging out in Florida and California, before I went back to New York for another show at the same gallery.

So I left the city and went first to Southern Florida where I took up residence in an old farm workers’ shack in the middle of an avocado grove. The avocados fed me and the groves gave me endless subject matter for my batik painting. From there, I headed west and ended up in Northern California in the Sierra Nevada where I lived with old friends on thirty remote acres in a converted chicken shed which I turned into an idyllic studio and hide-out from the world. These were some of my poorest times; although I kept batiking, with few outlets for sales. But over a three year period, I think I did some of my best work to date and showed in local galleries, while I basically supported myself working at a local half-way house for mentally ill people and baking at a local health food restaurant once a week. I might have continued like this for years but had a quick and ill-advised runaway romance with an artist from Kansas and found myself on the road once more, this time in an old Volkswagen bus. We crossed the country a couple of times and ended up in Chicago, house cleaning with a friend for six months. That wasn’t much fun but I always had a batik table set up somewhere and somehow, my batik work always continued.

My next stop, in the mid Eighties, was West Virginia where I set up shop in an old schoolhouse. I remember that period with great fondness; my romance with the Kansas lady ended badly in divorce but I got my Green card out of it and had no viable option but to batik endlessly. I remember being snowed in there in my little uninsulated wooden schoolhouse, with the ancient kids’ graffiti and old blackboards, all one winter and painting a series of snowscapes which I still like.  I had never really experienced or looked at deep snow before and found colours in there that I barely knew existed spring was a wonderful explosion of late flowers and latent hope and fall, a cacophony of coloured maple trees on fire in the balmy evenings. It was a very inspired period for me and I was discovered by a gallery in Ohio which took all the work I could do and gave me the means to leave America for the first time in a decade. I went first to the UK and saw my family for the first time in years. From there I checked out Ibiza again but it was starting to become the disco capital of the world and hardly recognizable. A friend suggested that I had a look at India and I made my first trip there. I loved it instantly, spent almost a year there and came back to West Virginia with subject matter that I couldn’t realise in a whole lifetime of batik work.

Between 1990 and the present date, I have been around the world, lived for a year in Bali where I had my own batik factory and designed batik fabrics for an English rave company called Loud and have probably been to India at least twenty times. In 1994, I found my own house in the Kumaon Foothills of Uttaranchal, above Almora in Northern India. The house is about fifty miles from the Tibetan border and has spectacular views of the highest snow peaks in the world from there. I love to trek and have walked all over the lower mountains. Above all, the Himalayas have provided me with inspiration and subject matter that I have yet to exhaust as well as somehow allowing me to be the most Jonathan that I want to be. The people are friendly, simple country folk whose lifestyle has changed very little as the rest of the world has rushed into huge transformations outside.

I had a motorbike accident in India in 2001 and retreated to England for treatment to a badly broken arm. It was a difficult time for me but I managed to dig myself out of my hole through a sudden renewed love for batik. I started a long series of portraits of the inhabitants of my Indian world and by the end of this new decade, have painted just about everybody in my village. In 2003, I met and married Beth, a fellow batik artist, and we have travelled and worked closely together since then, going to India to work in peace in the mountains and coming back to Colorado in the USA where we do shows all over the country to sell our work. In India, we have a young local boy to work with us and we sell prints of his work here at art shows in the States.

Last year we bought a small cabin in the south of Colorado which backs up to Greenhorn Mountain and National forestry land in the Rockies with a lake in front.  We came back from our latest trip to India in early summer and have just moved into our new country house. There are so many humming birds that you have to bat them off and I caught a black bear in our garbage last week. Our new studio will be built next week and then we can get back to formal work again although, compulsive batik artists that we are, we’re already working out on the deck with an improvised batik table in full summer sunshine.

Compulsive might be the operative word here, I think. It takes a very special and compulsive, even anal dare I say, person to devote a life to the batik medium. Part of the problem of the serious and dedicated batik artist is that there is a lot of very sloppy work out there under the batik umbrella. Artists, who would not be taken seriously for a moment in another art medium like oils or acrylics or watercolours, regularly show their batik work and expect to be taken seriously. Please, go that extra mile or so and really get that technique down, I would say to them.  Amateurish and badly executed work is partially one of the reasons that batik is often unknown, or if known, then what gives batik a bad name. If you’re serious about it and are driven to try and create realistic representational work, it is a very slow, time-consuming and unforgiving art form. There’s precious little room for mistakes and once they’re made, you’ve just got to live with them, although I have been known to introduce sudden new clouds into a cloudless blue sky or magnolia flowers on an otherwise flower-less tree following accidents with the wax pot.  When you’ve run through the planned sequence of dyes and waxing and when you’re done, you’re done. I might be tempted to play around with an oil painting forever, trying to improve it, but with batik, when the last dye is on, you’re finished. And that’s part of the medium’s attraction, I suppose; all that you’re left to do is to move onto the next piece and try and get it right this time.

For me, batik has always been a way to explore the world, to record my life experience and to process this weird and wonderful opportunity that we are all given, more or less, for a limited time on earth. Sometimes, I hate the medium for its rigidity, its tedious and slow process and its difficulties. Sometimes I both love and hate it for the inherent mystery of the process; as each piece progresses and gets darker, more obscure and covered with wax, it become impossible to know what you’re doing and what you’ve got. There’s a tantalizing period when you lose the plot and the vision you started out with but in the final analysis, the revelation at the end is often worth it.

Batik is still an unknown art form on the very last art frontier. And that nagging question, “What is Batik?” reflects the long trip into public consciousness that the medium still has to make, in spite of it being an ancient and honourable art form. Me, I’ve taken to dodging the issue and saying that I paint using an unusual wax- resist process on cloth. Perhaps the medium needs another name to survive and to thrive in the west. If Shibori can give good old Tie Dye a new lease of life, then Rozome is batik by any other Japanese name and has given batik a slightly new lease of life. If I could come up with my own new name for the medium, I could probably give myself a new lease of life and go onto batik for another forty years. I probably would if I could; it sure beats working in a bank, any day of the week.

 

Seven Women at a Wedding

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