about Joanie Mitchell

I have always made line drawings. In pen and ink I was the master of the quick sketch. In a few strokes I rendered the throbbing streets of New York and London, Istanbul and Paris. I drew the faces of my neighbours in Ununio, a fishing village on the East African coast. I drew truckers and tribesmen in the southern Sudan, holy men in the temples of India, children and elders in the markets of Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and Ethiopia. I made a visual record of concerts and parties, marches and meetings, weddings and ceremonies.

And when I came to long for color, I found the place where line and color meet in the art of batik painting. I found batik or batik found me. In Bali in my small guesthouse, the host family, including the children, were all painting a batik sarong with dye. The white fabric was stretched out on a frame two meters long, the picture had been drawn in golden wax. The subject was fish. I asked to join them and was handed a stick with a piece of foam tied on with string. I dipped it in dye and touched it to the cloth. The color spread across the rayon and was stopped by the wax line. It was magic and I knew that I had to learn all about it.

I have been doing batik ever since, first studying in Java, and then working in Bali in the workshop of Ketut Sujana. Now I translate my line drawings into images of California hills, mountains and rivers, tropical gardens and forests, horses and fish, flowers and trees and the human form. Much of batik's long history has involved collaboration, and I especially enjoy creating batik with Barbara Ivan, Sheila Duffy, and Ketut Sujana.

Barbara Ivan is my art partner and teacher, she is my inspiration for composition and colour. To the right is a picture of Barbara and her grandson Rama wearing our batiks during a photo shoot.

About Joanie's Spiritual Art

Where does it come from the urge to create, the need to make one's own version of the world?

Every year I arrive in Bali with a burning image. Sometimes I have to express this image in different ways, like Monet's haystacks, there seem an infinite number of interpretations of the same place or idea.

One year I was compelled to do batik of certain trees, oaks, madrones and manizanitas that grow on my land in Northern California, another time it was a waterfall and cave I saw in Hawaii and sketched with a barrowed pen on the back of a checkbook. This year it is a Balinese wonder that I had to draw and paint again and again, the holy spring at Batu Karu.

I have been making batik in Bali for many years, and the Hindu spirituality that is fundamental to Balinese culture has influenced me more and more. In this philosophy it is believed that desire exists within God, and that this desire is the momentum that creates the universe.

According to this teaching, artists too respond to desire. The artwork itself arises as a result of a marriage between the desire in the spirit of the artist and the artist's body. The mind images, but without the hand, nothing can be manifested. The children of this marriage are the artworks themselves that can live on after the artist's death, give joy and solace to future generations, and adorn the world.