David Lucht

My goal is to envision the ancient craft of batik as fine art. Batik originated in the world of craft where people created beauty to contribute a sense of grace to their daily lives. I try to bring forward the history of that desire for commonplace beauty and use it to form the support for my own imagery. By developing a craft into a fine art, I can feel a kinship with people who engage in this everyday pursuit of elegance and beauty.

Batik offers a highly unique, textured, graphic quality that can operate to suggest three-dimensional space while maintaining a two-dimensional, or flat, quality that suits the medium. Also in batik, the image and the cloth become one, a fully integrated thing. There is no surface decoration in batik. The image is established in the fiber of the cloth. I find that to be a very powerful idea.

Batik painting offers solutions to me. It provided an escape valve that allows me to see the history of art differently. It comes from the world of craft, and that appeals to me in many ways, as communality, as beauty in the utilitarian, and as an anti-elitist alternative. Batik is undiscovered territory. It appeals to me for its magical qualities of obscurity and revelation. The finished work is only seen in its entirety at the very end of the process, when the wax is removed and the image is revealed.

I've been a loyal Dharma customer for eight years or so. I use the Jacquard (Green label) series of dyes, but have recently purchased some Procion dyes to experiment with. I love the silk selection at Dharma and use the heavy Silk Satin scarves for many of the pieces you see here. My other pieces are done on handmade paper.