#10 Beth McCoy

Beth McCoy was raised in Washington D.C. and Maryland in a family of art lovers. When she graduated high school she did little odd jobs until she stumbled into painting and then in 1990 she fell in love with batik while she was designing and painting hand painted apparel in her Colorado shop. She was entralled by the process of drawing, waxing, dying and then over dying. She began to experiment on clothing and table linens at first. A couple years later when visiting a gallery she saw some very realistic batik paintings which moved her to take her work beyond the simple decorative motifs she previously had been doing. She is self taught with a lot of trial and error and travels the world to gather inspiration for her work. In 2006 she began experimenting with batik pointillism.

http://www.batikartbybeth.com/index.php

http://www.batikartbybeth.com/graphics/ro/Mother%20and%20Baby.jpg

The batik painting of hers that I decided to talk about is the one called "mother and baby". She took this photo one the streets in Delhi but she altered the background from a busy city street to greenery. I really like the fact that this artist experiments with different techniques and I love that she is experimenting with pointillism. Personally I think that it makes the portrait that much more interesting. I love all the colors that she was able to create by putting certain dots together in certain ways. I also like the fact that she changed to background to greenery because I feel it makes it easier for me to focus on the subjects in the painting with are the mother and baby and if she had kept the background of the city it would have been entirely to distracting. I love that texture that pointillism with batik creates and I like that she was still able to create depth in the portrait as much as she was by just using little tiny dots.