Sally Hawkins
The art of thinking differently: Overcoming boundaries within any art form by means of mixed media.

Any traditional art form has potential to become a mixed media. Mixed media by definition is the blending of two or more mediums together. Some of those combinations can be simple, less obvious, for instance if a painter blends European painting methods into Asian painting methods they are both painting, but their traditional methods and materials are quite different. The application and creative genius of mixed media can come into being for a variety of reasons, one such reason is to overcome limitation in the art form itself. An artist may explore going beyond the traditional boundaries of a fine art during some process in their art experience as Sally Hawkins has in her silk painting.

Sally Hawkins of San Juan Island has been pursuing Silk painting as a Mixed Media with different pigment and different application for several years. Although her pursuit of silk painting emerges from a love of the Traditional form of Japanese Silk painting, a style that is commonly found in Japanese Buddhists temples or on privacy screens, she has found herself going on a search to refine one element that allows for a more "free flow of dye" in the attempt of getting around the line of resist, something she considers to be too restrictive.

The restrictive element she is referring to in this style of painting is actually known as a "hard line of resist," and it's the resist that is a fundamental element of Japan's dyeing technique and is a paste resist dyeing technique, which also includes the stencil dyeing method. This method allows the artist to draw a shape defined by the line of resist to control where the dye flows.

As a matter of distinction the Batik style is also a hard line resist where the free flow of dye only goes so far as the line of resist created by using wax or latex applied with a pen. The traditional Japanese style employs soy or rice paste.

During Sally's early evolution in her silk painting process she began working with Mary Sly, of San Juan Island who has made her silk painting focus in garment painting, a very different process from the Traditional Japanese process in application and materials. This is where Sally got her beginnings and eventually took those methods learned into her own artistic versions. Sally's earliest pieces relied entirely on the hard line of resist to control the color flow in and around her animal and floral shapes using only commercial resists and dyes, much the way she learned from Mary Sly. You can see in the image titled "Reptiles" where Sally clearly demonstrates the effects of using a hard line of resist. Notice the outlines on each animal? [See image #1 - "Reptiles" by Sally Hawkins]

Next, Sally wanted to unveil a technique to obscure that hard line in the resist technique in order to retain what she really loves about free flowing dye. Late in 2003 Sally began to experiment with the addition of acrylic paint to her process in the attempt to overcome the severe hard line that separates color areas. This process still required using the technique of creating a hard line to resist the flow areas, but as a final layer the acrylic paint applied to the silk did achieve the desired result and allowed for a painterly effect along the obvious hard line look. [See image #2 - "Crain - The Bow" by Sally Hawkins] In this piece we see that she indeed obscures the area of the feathers between the black region on the lower portion of the wined area and the top of the wing, which was died in a pale pink and is approximately a number three in value. This means she controls the paint flow between extreme value ranges by painting over the area normally seen as a thin line into a broad area further defining it into a portion of the actual wing. [See image #3 - "Crain - The Bow" Detail by Sally Hawkins]

By all accounts she appears to have overcome the problem of the traditional hard line of resist technique to create the appearance of "free flow." However, there now exists a new problem, which is product of using the acrylic paint. She has now lost the reflective qualities of the silk in the transition areas by using the acrylic paint on the silk.

Although she succeeded in her mission she now wants to overcome the issue that Sally has began looking for yet another approach to accomplish the beauty she sees in the "free flow" of dyes. Sally has now turned to employing the more traditional Japanese methods, and she sees potential in shifting away from the commercial resist and dye products to using soy paste and natural dies which gives the potential to allow for over painting into the resist made by the soy paste.

Sally was then faced with the unexpected issue that has sent her to the drawing board looking for yet another approach to accomplish the beauty she sees in the "free flow." This is where Sally has turned to employing the more traditional Japanese methods and the sees potential in shifting away from the commercial resist and dye products to using soy paste which has the potential to allow for over painting into the resist made by the soy paste.