The Alchemy of Collaborating with Nature through Art

What are eco-prints? Eco-printing is a technique where plants, leaves and flowers leave their shapes, color, and marks on fabric. Plant materials bundled inside of cloth are steamed or boiled to release the dye found naturally inside the plants, creating a con- tact print in the shape of the leaf or flower used.

There is a sense of place in my eco-printed paintings. The plants I use are collected from the land surrounding my Oregon home of 33 years. I have found due to their naturally high tannin dyes, plants like sumac, maple, oak, eucalyptus, geranium and ferns make the most successful prints.

The preparation for my eco-printed paintings is labor intensive and involves many steps.

I work with a variety of raw silk noil fabrics as my canvas in the first step of eco-printing. The silk fabric must be cleaned of gums and oils by scouring (washing) and then cooked with an alum mordant to increase the fibers receptivity to the plant’s natural dyes.

Leaves and flowers are positioned aesthetically on the silk and rolled into bundles. The bundles are then steamed for 3 hours. I will often repeat this printing process with a secondary soymilk mordant to develop a stronger print with richer colors and added botanical elements.

The eco-printed silk canvases are washed, dried, ironed, and evaluated for mounting them onto cradled birch panels.
To create a luminous underlying surface, I apply four coats of heated traditional gesso.

I choose a framed compositional field within the eco-printed fabric to mount and glue onto the gessoed birch panels with PVA glue. The silk canvas surface is readied for painting with a protective application of PVA sizing.

My actual painting process begins by responding to the one of a kind eco-prints with additional visual elements. I used a mixed media approach starting with acrylics, followed by layers of oil paint and cold wax translucent glazes.

I am guided in a collaboration with Nature that results in paintings that I find animated with an autonomist life of their own.

Lisa Brinkman

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