Silk Painting Painting

Gutta Serti technique onto Silk Painting scarf 90x90 Silk Painting or The Gutta Serti Technique of Silk Painting to give it its full title is a 'Resist" technique of drawing and painting on silk using special dyes formulated for silk and wool and traditionally using a tree sap to create lines. The tree sap is found in the Far East extracted from the Gutta-percha tree, a latex kept liquid using various solvents. The origins of its use as a resist may appear in Traditional Batik which uses wax mixed with various gums to prevent the wax from cracking. One such gum may well easily have been gutta-percha. Batik families have always guarded their wax recipes, but the use of gums is mentioned acknowledged at the highest level of manufacture and therefore it seems highly likely that gutta-percha may be one of these 'secret' gums. Certainly the tree is indigenous where batik is a traditional art form. If this is the case then the use of Gutta-percha for use with cotton and silk will go back a few hundred years in the far east. The origins of the Gutta Serti Technique of Silk Painting as we know it today would seen to have its roots in the early part of the C20th with France and Germany have always been the main manufacturers of Silk Painting materials. The chemical dyes or paints were invented during the latter part of the C19th and are fixed into the silk or made colour fast by steam heating. Steam fixing is also an industrial process for making dyes colour fast for printed patterns on cotton and silk. The origins of Gutta Serti(enclosing or fencing) using Gutta-percha may be linked to a Russian man who came to Paris in the early C20th and who gave his name to an important manufacturer of silk paints called Kiazeff. Latex from the tree eventually included a synthetic gutta or serti which known as Water Based Gutta unlike its tree sap Gutta-percha cousin is water soluble. Gutta-percha is now called Spirit Based Gutta when relating to Silk Painting having formerly been called Solvent Based Gutta and has been stated is not water soluble. Silk Painting as it develops will continue to evolve with new products appearing on the market making use of other textile techniques as part of a wider practice of picture making on silk under the commercial umbrella of what is called Silk Painting, however reduced to its traditional and basic skill where drawing and painting are the primary urge it retains the essence of drawing and painting.