ARTS 35
Leaf, Cocoon, Cloth: Silk Painting and Introduction to Natural Dyes Winter 2025

This course explores techniques used to paint on the most luxurious of surfaces: silk. Unlike traditional painting , where the medium sits on top of canvas, the dyes used in silk painting become part of the fabric grain itself. This allows the artist to play with transparency, layering, and movement. Students will leave the course with a brief overview of silk’s history, its lifecycle and production, and the various applications of dye and resist across cultures. They will also be introduced to relief printing by hand and how to design a repeatable pattern. Utilizing the natural dye lab in the Spencer Printshop, students will also learn the basics of natural dye processing. They will learn how to derive color from leaves, twigs, and insects, which mordants to use for which fibers, and aid in building a communal color library. Emphasis will be placed on materials that can be sourced from common food waste and the local landscape (even in the dead of winter!) These dyes will be used as material for individual works as well as printed yardage. The resulting final project will either be one large-scale silk painting, multiple smaller paintings, or a sculptural work built from silk yardage. The works will be featured in an end of semester group exhibition in the Spencer Studio Art Building.