African Fabric Lady

Our current inventory of Pictorial Batiks from West Africa includes some beautiful and evocative designs that tell a story and are produced by hand on cotton cloth.

They are created as one of-a-kind artworks or made in multiples using an original image to copy or cartoons that can be traced. Whether an original or one of many, each batik must be dyed to hand, making each image unique.

Batik Cartoons at Bakau, The Gambia

Batiks, dyed light to dark with successive layers of wax sometimes have black outlines separating the colors and sometimes dark spider-webby lines appear in somewhat random patterns where the wax was cracked before the final dyeing. Typically, these batiks are colorfast.

Batik Factory in Bakau, The Gambia

More recently artisans developed what seems to be a more efficient means of coloring the designs by painting color into each “field” separated from the others by wax lines rather than continuing to wax and dye the entire surface of the fabric color by color. Some of the character found in true wax batik is lost using this piecemeal painting technique, however if you dislike the spidery lines, this may be the process you prefer.

Some contemporary artisans use a resist of cooked paste made from cassava or wheat flour. It is stirred to a smooth thick liquid and either trailed, painted or screened onto the fabric. The fabric is allowed to dry completely before coloring the designs with cool temperature dye. The dried paste resists the dye.
In all cases the pictures tell a story, and many depict aspects of the culture that might not appear on the surface of vibrant everyday life in West Africa.

You can see more of my pictures from West Africa (soon) in the Galleries Section of this blog and see more Batiks for sale here