Facebook photo album: Mo's silk painting (photos, art)

Mo's silk painting.

Painting on silk has got to be one of the most challenging forms of painting but the rewards are amazing. The silk glows with an inner light and the paintings are luminous. Many of my silk hoops came out of my stint at drawing and photographing flowers. But I work from real life as the human eye can see far more than the camera lens.

I tend to work in series and in a variety of media. I begin many flower pieces with a pencil drawing (see my drawing folder) but sometimes I just draw directly on the white silk. There's something so compelling about that flowing surface. Nile iris...I lost interest in the drawing, never finished it but it does show the gutta (like batik) lines. 9.5" habotai silk and clear waterbase gutta.

NB I prefer gold gutta percha but it's extremely unstable and often tarnishes or worse, goes gummy and ruins everything it touches. It's basically rubber cement. I also tried acrylic Neopaque and really hated it and it constantly plugged the metal tip I used to draw it with.




First step is to draw the design on stretched silk with gutta percha, or water-based resist. Sort of like batik.


The Chinese gardener at Neil's ashram was ill in the hospital so they made a healing quilt for him. Mine was the only silk piece. I was on display at the Oakland SYDA ashram for quite a while. I had a pot of cyclamens as my model and a surprise night guest: a snail who appears in other silk drawings. 9x9" habotai silk, dye and gutta. 2004? 2005?



Panel for a silk wall hanging for the 2005 international SPIN conference in New Mexico. Mt St Helena, a coyote howling at the moon. A bluejay and a salmon, all totemic animals.9x9" habotai silk, dye and gutta.



Detail of a panel for a silk wall hanging for the 2005 international SPIN conference in New Mexico. This one was never used. I forgot to include a border for seam allowance and had to redo it all over again in 45 minutes and ship it to England in the evening post . 9x9" habotai silk, dye and gutta.



Mt St Helena—Alexander Valley. I don't even know where it is—it's part of an international silk quilt travelling the world. Last I heard it was in Sydney, Oz. Hard to tell, but there's also a poem written on it in gold in the furrows. 2005



The silk wall hanging for the 2005 international SPIN conference in New Mexico. Mine are 2nd row, first on left and last row, last on right. I was the only artist who had two panels. Isabella Wentworth of England created this project and most of the continents are represented. It traveled from GB to Iceland to New Mexico to Australia, where it resides today.






Celtic fish and eel. After 9/11, I drew about 50 Celtic hoops and didn't paint in most of them... This one I finally finished in 2006. I think having to adapt complex Celtic designs to fit 9 inch silk hoops was so challenging that it offered some respite from the horror that followed. 9.5" habotai silk, dye and gutta. 2002/2006



Waterfall at the end of the mind... Wildcat Beach, Beltaine. (May Day). This is the waterfall below Pelican Lake at Double Point above Bolinas. I camped there with a bunch of crazed fifth graders and that night we saw rare white deer under full moonlight. A poem came unbidden and some lines are scribed on the silk. 9x14" habotai silk, dye and gutta. 1989



Tengo Dinero. Cabo San Lucas before it was Miami beached. 9x14" habotai silk, dye and gutta. 1989



The first poem painting I ever made—only there was never a poem, I sent this idea as a valentine to a friend, and then I did another for the Sonoma State Art Auction, which the Dean of Humanities bought. He asked me if I had others. I said no but I went home and did this one which became part of a series of poem paintings. Illuminated manuscripts were my inspiration. I later had a show of the pieces at the California Museum of Art. 9x14" habotai silk, dye and gutta. 1989



Gauguin's The Savage Dream... my childhood friend Micaela Carr sent me her drawing of a gecko that wound up in this painting. I'd just returned from Peru and the Galapagos. Gauguin lived in Lima as a child. 9x14" habotai silk, dye and gutta. The direct scan doesn't do the piece justice. 1989



Three scarves. Orchids for Mina, roses for Justa and poppies for Mari. 9x45" habotai silk, dye and gutta.  2004







My cousin, a watercolorist said: Those roses are stunning! I answered: They had a short shelf life in the hot sun. A friend, Shiva grows hundreds of types of roses so I gathered the ones I liked and then drew them from life. This became a scarf for a Cuban friend's mother in Miami.  2004


© 2007 Maureen Hurley All works of art and photographs in these albums are © copyright by Maureen Hurley and may not be used in any endeavor or context. Got that, Facebook? November 10, 2007







added 2/2017 These are salvaged from Facebook, so I'm saving them here all in one place for the prose as well. They're extremely small files. Loaded with artifacts. No use printing them.


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