British artist Maureen Walker loves watching the spread of colour from putting dye on silk.
Walker, who came to Vancouver Island in 1998 from the U.K., is known around town as a silk painter.
She began in oils and later switched to acrylics.
Her work in silk all began when she met the President of the International Guild of Silk Painters about a quarter of a century ago. At the time, Walker happened to be present when the president was doing her first silk painting workshop.
“As soon as I put a brush of the liquid colour, the dye onto the silk … there are two things that got me. It was the intensity of the pigment and the spread of the colour. And I was totally hooked,” she told the PNR.
Now, Walker paints a few abstracts in acrylics, but has been a silk painter ever since that workshop.
An ancient traditional medium, Walker said painting on silk has been around as long as silk has.
“In those days they would have used natural dyes. I could do that but life is too short. It’s a very long, labour intensive process using natural dyes,” said Walker.
Instead, she uses synthetic dyes based on the aniline dyes invented in the middle of the 19th century. She said that’s also why she can get really intense colour.
“The difference between the dyes that we use to paint on silk and paints in any other medium, is that paints have fillers in them, and it’s the fillers in paint which enable the pigments, the colour, to adhere to the surface you’re working on.”
Her dyes, she said, don’t have fillers, they’re just pure pigment in water.
There is nothing in them to make them adhere to the surface, which is her silk canvas. She gave the example of red wine spilling on a favourite white shirt or tablecloth. People can’t believe how far it spreads.
“That’s because it travels along the warp and weft of the woven silk and so your eyes are going to exploit that spread of colour and that’s such a fun exciting way of working, a very fast way of working, because you’re chasing colour all over your silk canvas.”
The opposite way, she said, is to control the spread of the colour.
“I’m a colourist first and foremost,” she said when it comes to her inspiration.
Since she began painting with see on silk, she initially used french dyes, as there weren’t many suppliers who sold anything to do with the medium living where she did in England.
“It’s the kind of medium that because it’s been around for so many millions of years almost, it goes in and out of fashion.”
And so Walker would pop over to France to buy all her supplies from there. She said it also happened to work wonders for her french vocabulary.
She said when she used french dyes, they had over 200 of them to choose from, and she soon discovered that if you bought the primary colours you could make up all your own.
“I still only paint with the primary’s and so everything you see in my work is individually mixed, unique colours,” she said.
It’s something Walker has carried over to her students. She teaches them with primary colours, as she said, it’s a good discipline for learning a lot about colour and how it works.
She said she’s grateful to the Saanich Peninsula Arts and Crafts Society (SPAC) for having the workshops. This year marks her fourth year teaching them.
“It gives members the opportunity to experience all kinds of different arts and crafts that they would never ordinarily think of trying.”