The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. – Jackson Pollock, American painter
Scores of interesting sketches are accumulating in my drawer but the inspiration to paint has yet to come.
Laziness remains the culprit, a typical quandary of many artists.
Any motivation is long overdue. My last two batik pieces were commissioned some five years ago by a wealthy couple.
One was an imaginative painting featuring the wife as a young maiden dressed in a typical Iban kain, tied up to her waist just enough to cover her modesty but is topless. It now adds vibrancy and exoticism to their flashy bungalow. That piece was inspired by Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), a French post-impressionist who did mostly oil paintings.
During my varsity days (1975-79) painting was both a passion and obsession. My medium was mostly emulsion paint on canvas with inspirations from the art movements such as post-impressionism and surrealism. But later, Conceptualism took centre stage, thanks to the late Prof Redza Piyadasa, the country’s pioneer of conceptualism. He was then my sculpture lecturer and mentor.
Gauguin’s Tahiti-inspired paintings such as Parau api (1892), Trois Tahitian (1899) and a few others did inspire me to some extent. So were paintings by some other artists.
For example, surrealist cum futurist Salvador Dali (1904-1989) had a great influence on me, especially on works accomplished by emulsion paints. His painting The Burning Giraffe (1937) is among his more interesting pieces as does La Pesca del Atun (1966) and The Galatea of the Spheres (or its Spanish version Galatea de las esferas) completed in 1952. All showed his personal struggles against the world which was related to mine in those days.
His paintings, however, did not have much impact on my batik pieces but Gauguin’s works did.
After doing a lot of paintings on canvas and experimenting with oil and emulsion, I had to make some real adjustments and initially tried some paintings effecting exploratory expressionistic modes as well as the surreal or realistic depictions of objects and subjects, sometimes referred to as ‘images’ in the art world.
These trends stayed for a while but in the 90s, I rediscovered that viewers preferred realism to abstract expressionism.
Traditional batik designers would understand batik as a fabric on which coloured patterns are born, starting with the plain white cloth to which wax has been applied in order to bring out the patterns.
This same principle is applied during the course of doing batik paintings.
Perhaps the only difference a batik painting has from ordinary batik pattern or design is that batik painting depicts a scenery, images, story or message by means of its motifs, figures, shapes, colours, lines, patterns, brush strokes and other artistic attributes belonging to the art surface or picture space.
What characterises batik painting from other paintings is the use of cloth, dyes and wax. By this, the painting is distinguished from others by its ‘cracks’, referring to the cracked patterns effected by applying thick wax on the cloth surface after all the colours are done.
After the application, this hardened surface will be cracked to arrive at a pattern where any dark colour of black, red, green or blue is again applied.
This colour will permeate the cracks and stay there as permanent cracks and patterns, giving the painting a batik identity and character.
It was in 1970, while in Form Three, that I first learned batik painting under the tutelage of our teacher Stephen Teo, a well-known Sarawak batik exponent.
In 1971, our new teacher Joshua Jalie Linggong took over the reins of the Batik Club of Saratok Secondary School. At that time, I was very much inspired by the promise of an exhibition.
Jalie, my distant cousin, who years later became my colleague at Rajang Teachers College, Bintangor, kept his promise and brought us to Kuching for an exhibition at the British Council Hall.
This 1971 group exhibition was the first of any exhibition for most of us. Two of us later, namely yours truly and Mulok Saban, respectively became the state’s first and second fine arts graduates from any Malaysian varsity. Sadly, both of us did not get to share our batik painting expertise with school students or others.
I only taught Arts Education to teacher trainees for a few months before being transferred to a secondary school on promotion.
Since the first piece made in 1970 and over exhibitions held in and outside Malaysia for more than 40 years, I just keep two batik pieces for my own collection. Nevertheless, I keep on admiring a copy each of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflower adorning my humble home.
