BATIK ART BY LUKANDWA DOMINIC

This batik shows a busy street downtown Kampala, Uganda's capital city. It's one in a 5 series project showing the busy spots of downtown Kampala. It's a scene where 14-seater taxis, buses, motorcyclists (bodaboda), and pedestrians jossle for the little space available on the narrow streets. I believe this is the true representation of what it feels like to walk downtown Kampala. It's not easy. The lady crossing the road is taking food to a nearby shopping mall. She'll do her rather dangerous rounds many times crossing the street with plates of food and drinks from 6am in the morning to 6pm in the evening and is paid an equivalent of 1.50 US dollars per day. She eats the left-overs for lunch. Such is the life in downtown Kampala.

This brand new batik 'AFRICAN WOMAN ' (2013) shows my fullfilled desire to escape the pain of making 'black' faces. I have always longed for figurative batik to take a centre stage in my artwork. This new year I'll have more of these and less of the 'black' empty faces. I want my characters to have a facial expression and I think with this picture finished, I'll continue to be successful. 

In this batik titled THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TREES (2013), I was exploring the idea of what is seen through the trees during a sunset. This was an addition to DEEP IN THE WOODS (2012) (below) which had weaverbirds among the trees.

This is my l6th in a series of fish batiks under the title of Fish Journeys. This one is more detailed with the use of lines dominating the painting. These lines are drawn by passing a brush filled with hot wax over the fabric in a linear fashion. As more layers of waxed lines are drawn and dyes added, the picture begins to come out. 

During the festive season, I was busy working on 4 batiks including these 2 and I've just finished the ironing. The underlying idea was to experiment with a small brush dipped in wax to come up with lots of lines to separate color. I had to rewax these lines a number of times for them to still remain visible even after the darker dyes were added.  The goal was to bring a web-like feeling to these batiks and I think I was successful to an extent.