Kim Gordon Fine Art

A few years ago I had a chance encounter with something unusual – a variation on the ancient art of batik, using watercolor and wax on rice paper. Entranced, I walked right through that batik door and found a new way of making images. Suddenly I saw the world around me with a different eye, a batik eye. Batik is both very graphic and subtle. It forces you to paint around things, to define the negative spaces, to allow the subject to be revealed through successive layers of pigment and wax.

All the things that compelled me as a life-long painter – the defining and eroding effect of light on form, the sense of place heightened by plein air observation and painting – became somehow charged as I rethought imagery in batik terms, as words are heightened by the structure of haiku. The batik practice has led me to view the place I live, the place I have spent years observing, with fresh eyes.