I managed to remember to photograph the first painting twice — once as it emerged from the garage session, and then again after I had been through the critique and had tweaked it in the studio. I didn’t do a lot to this  painting in my second go-round, but when I finished I was concerned about the loss of some of the “naive” quality of the red building. Here are images of the two versions:

Library Parking Garage, View South (first draft) 12 x 16, oil on board

Library Parking Garage, South View (draft 2), etc.

The differences between the two are slight, but the concern expressed by one member of the crit group was about the wonky perspective on the red building. I later mucked about with that building (as well as darkening the edge of the roofline the takes up much of the bottom of the painting  and which will get more work). I’m not sure the red building, as it now stands, is what I want. Another person suggested perhaps making all the buildings more wonky, which I didn’t have time for, but would still consider.

This series of decisions (as well as a rather funny comment by a fellow critiquer)  is what made my ears perk up when I read the Schiller quote. Is the first wonky take more “naive” in Schiller’s sense, than the second, somewhat less wonky, version? The comment from my fellow painter (who actually defended the wonky perspective) was something like “I’d like to be behind your eyes, seeing what you see when you drive down the street.”

The second painting references the Morandi/edge discussion and is a continuation of my visual wandering around the constructs of edges. I don’t have a photograph of the original post-garage painting, but the photo below is of the painting after I worked it a bit prior to the critique session. My hasty working was to try to eliminate the edge that runs down the slab of building in the center of the painting. My intent was to push that building out of the way of the steeple and crane, both of which were central to what I was seeing.

The Library Parking Garage, West view (draft 1) 12 x 16, oil on board

After the critique, I modified the edge treatment of the slab, as well as pushing back, through losing the edges, the church roof and the foreground building edging. I also added shadows and changed hues a bit — the result is shown in the image below.

The Library Parking Garage, West view (draft 2)

This last version, below, now sits in my studio, awaiting further revelations; I have made the slab more colorful and attempted to mirror somewhat the big block of sky on the other side. I also modified some of the color in the bottom righthand building.

The Library Parking Garage, West view (draft 4)

So to recap: In the first version, which is close to what the original looked like,  I tried losing the edge of the big building on the right. Then I went to the critique meeting, where the lost edges were seen as too lost but also some of the other edges as too defined; so I added the lighter strip down the side of the big frontal slab and muckled about with the edges of the other buildings. Further emendations included changing some of the color, sharpening the steeple and church elements, and attempts at making the slab wall on the right echo something of the sky on the left.

I’m still debating about reinforcing that edge and wondering what it is that losing or finding or almost finding an edge means to the painting as a whole. What I was thinking of while I was painting was the sharpness of the steeple and the crane and the losing any impact of the slab, in spite of its size on the canvas (and in my view). That’s what happens in cities — people no longer see the altered, mangled buildings that sometimes inject themselves into photographs. But why did Morandi lose his edges as he does — is it the sense of oneness of all things, the lack of object individuality that he’s concentrating on? And then he delineates a very strong contour line on the opposite side of his lost edge, so he not only finds the other edges but thrusts it at us. Somewhat like that crane thrusts itself…..

OK, I’m through meandering. Please comment willy-nilly as you will. And I’m interested in why one loses or finds or sharpens or softens edges — not as a matter of aesthetics or realism, if you will, but as a matter of intent and philosophy.

The eureka moment came through the phrase used by one of the fine art critics: the phrase was “working the surface.” “Working the surface” in the traditional fine arts means adding, deleting, scraping, underpainting and overpainting, sanding, gouging — all the kinds of things one can do that either uncover and/or add to a planar surface. It seems clear to me that Jay’s process of working his boards and foamcore are fine examples of “working the surface.”

With quilted art, “working the surface” seems to show up in two ways. One is what is called “surface design,” which basically alters the flat plane, by dyeing it, laying rust on it, discharging (bleaching) it, monoprinting on it, and even digging into it, tearing and unraveling the threadwork. This work sometimes adds texture (especially with elements applied to the surface (applique) or taken away from it (“cutwork” or just plain gouging holes). These kinds of working of the plane are singular, patterned for the effect in a particular work, not meant to be turned into a commercial design for fabric (the original use of “surface design” had a strong commercial element.) The other part of working the surface with textiles is the work of embroidery and quilted lines that make for a frieze effect; when stitches are pushed through the two layers of fabric and the in-between batting or wadding, the stitched line makes an indentation, beside which the surface becomes raised by the pushed-aside materials.

I have never heard the phrase, “working the surface” applied to quilted art before, but when I heard that and then saw the intricacies of Jay’s working of his surfaces, I realized that the language may give me new insights into what can be done with quilted art.

At the critique, the guest “critics” (very kind observant folks) looked at two pieces I had brought, comparing them.

The first was one you’ve seen before: Mrs. Willard Waltzes with the Wisteria, 76 x 61″, 2003, hand dyed and painted cotton, embroiderie perse with computer-generated prints, and dyed overlays.

detail

This quilted piece has a strongly worked surface. The relief work of the quilted areas is combined with the hand-dyed mottled fabric and the graphically strong embroiderie perse of the appliqued/layered flowers to make a complex surface. My question for the critics was whether this was too complex an image, but they said it was very successful. What they also thought, though, was that the other piece that I showed, Mrs. Willard Dices with the Devil, lacked the very complexity of surface design that made the first successful.

Mrs. Willard Dices with the Devil, 64″ x 80″, hand-dyed and painted and quilted on cotton.

Mrs. Willard Dicing isn’t completely quilted. This incompleteness was not entirely because I didn’t have time (although that figures into the problem). The real reason that it’s incomplete is that I couldn’t figure out what I was doing with the background, except stitching it because that’s what stitchers do.

I found the foreground tombstone relatively easy to stitch:

The flat front of the stone needed a bit of surface texture against which to place the letters, and the top of the stone provides some sense of perspective, useful in this semi-flat composition.

Mrs. W. wasn’t too hard to quilt because she had to be the most solid element of the surface. Therefore I had to leave larger areas of her body unquilted to make the surface stand up between the stitches.

I even know how I will stitch Mr. Bones when I get a minute to do so — he’ll be heavily stitched in a shiny thread, silver or even clear polyester, which shimmers a bit when the light hits it. But the background –meaning the actual earth as well as the picture’s ground plane, stumped me.

However the concept of “working the surface” makes me realize that I need to add more variety in that ground; I needed to work the surface. I will probably do so in the form of added color as well as added stitching. And I might well do the stitching first and then pour on the color. Stitching before adding color means that the stiffening of the fabric won’t be such a pain when I am stitching it; and adding the color after the stitching could provide addition interest to the surface that a less complex set of values might lack. It was Jay’s gouging and then putting layers and layers of paint on his intaglio pieces that made me realize that I might be able to save the piece by doing this kind of work. With that idea, I think I can now bear to go back in and quilt more of the background, knowing that it will be further furbished with (I hope) subtle but interesting color. I also need to tone down the sky considerably, which I can do now that it’s stitched.

Which brings me to a last thought. One of the commentators on the piece said that I seem to have fallen between two modes of making art — the art which uses quilted surfaces and the art which uses painted surfaces. Actually he said it more bluntly: “June, you may have to make a choice between painting and quilting.”

This is the problem I’ve been wrestling with most of this year. Painting has a magical draw for me at the moment, but my contacts and communities are within the quilting arts. I hesitate to completely withdraw from the area that welcomed me and in which I am somewhat known. But I struggled so much with the quilting on Mrs. W. Dices that I was resigned to throwing aside the quilting art and completely immersing myself in painting. However, with the insights from various places that I’ve gained, I realize I was stuck not because I’ve been painting but because I simply didn’t know what I could do to save Mrs. Willard Dices with the Devil. Now I have an inkling of what might work.

So here’s a set of questions: do you work in a variety of media, and, if so, how do you justify the diffusion of focus that going back and forth between them can encourage? Have you made a difficult choice between media, abandoning one altogether? Is the brief essay above accurate in its views of the nature of “working the surface” as well as “surface design?” Are there other distinctions/comparisons between two different media that seem to illuminate as well as differentiate one another?

These are questions that I am mulling around as I am glaring at Mrs. W., still hanging on my design wall, waiting for me to move along. And I haven’t entirely abandoned the quilted art, although I find myself mightily reluctant to turn on the sewing machine.

Along with my Phaidon biography of Cezanne (by Mary Tompkins Lewis) and a Dover book of Durer’s Drawings, I brought a copy of Gregg Kreutz‘s Problem Solving for Oil Painters. The book resides in my studio where I thumb through it when I need to rest my fingers and arm and eye from the physical act of painting.

I’m not recommending (and yet not not recommending) the book exactly; Kreutz is a bit too dogmatic for my tastes. Yet he does give me some things to push off from.

Sometimes he says the obvious, but when it’s placed with other ideas, it feeds my own delight in structuring thoughts. For example, he says “turning reality into painterly effects requires not only creativity but insight and empathy…. Insight and perception — each element must create an idea in the painter’s mind.”

And a bit later, “Every painting must have …two subjects — the person or still life or view that you are looking at and the painterly concept that you will have decided will best express your reaction to that [motif].

Not bad, says I, but I would add a couple more elements to the requirement for making a good painting: first there’s the subject itself that must be depicted, explored, played with, and, duh, painted; then there’s the empathy and insight that the painter brings to the subject; third there are the painterly constructs, the actual materials and handling and delivery, that go into making a physical object to look at — these differ widely but must be thought about and made to work with the object and the empathy; Finally, the controlling idea of the painting has to be there when it’s finished.

The High Note Cafe, 12 x 16, oil on board.

So I find myself pleased — Kreutz has started me thinking and I’ve completed some thoughts beyond what he says. Of course, this might well be what he had in mind, since problem solving is his subject.

However, while much of what he says is ho-hum or immediately useful in solving a problem, some of what he says makes me argufy.

For example, he says, “For the painting to give satisfaction to you while you’re painting, and to the viewer afterward, there must be a sense of problems being solved.”

Huh?, I say, “is this true?” Sometimes it’s the absolute lack of of a sense of problem that leads me to love work. I think of Hanneke’s still lifes and it’s the effortlessness that they give the appearance of that thrills me.

Of course, Kreutz’s further observations on any given dogma often are useful, which is why I brought the book with me. For example, in discussing shadows on faces, he says, “remember, the shadow doesn’t get lighter as it nears the light, the light gets darker.” That seems quite close to a philosophical position, found in the center of a “how-to” paragraph. i’m still pondering the implications for aging and tired concepts that “the light gets darker” can have.

Kreutz’s position on organizing the palette tends to send me into snits: “Is your palette efficiently organized? he asks, and then recommends a rigid structuring of color and layout, with a palette that’s bigger than many of my paintings. While his basic concept, that “making pictures is hard enough without the material and craft side of it holding you back” is a good one, he talks of spending forty-five minutes in the morning, setting up his palette, cleaning off the dried skin, adding paint, cleaning the mixing area, and so forth.

If it took me forty-five minutes to start my day’s work, I’d be frustrated and bored ( a terrible combination of feelings) before I began. For my palette processes, I use a wax paper layer over an ordinary sized plastic palette, throw it out when it gets messy, have a general notion of where the three primary colors go with white in the middle and blacks around the edges. It takes me three minutes to set up in the morning. But at night, I generally get ready for the next day, not just cleaning brushes and tidying messes, but also refilling medium containers, saving or tossing the paint, and studying what I have done during the day so my brain can be thinking about the next steps while I sleep. It’s almost exactly the opposite of the process that Kreutz uses.

Kreutz endears himself to me when he validates my own processes, of course. He says more than three colors in combination are redundant — and then admits he often violates this concept. Exactly.

He speaks of attacking a bad painting with his palette knife; in a “fit of pique” he scrapes off all the paint and finds good things in what remains. He also uses his palette knife to blob paint on a painting where it needs emphasis, a most satisfying combination of physical action and resulting vision corresponding. I use the palette knife in almost exactly these aggressive physical ways. And my textile training gives me the additional tool of scissors:

I would never be mulling much over Kreutz, except that, here in my Banker’s building studio in Basin Montana, my resources are limited. I find that the bits and pieces I read feed my thinking in a way that a larger set of resources and long pieces of dogma wouldn’t. It’s lovely that limitations can springboards for some thinking about my own ideas and processes.

What ideas or processes used by someone else have set you up for refining your own concepts and processes? Have you ever found that being forcibly limited in access to materials or ideas to be a broadening experience? Do you work better when you disagree with the “expert” opinion?

To that last question, I must admit that, yes, disagreement often fuels my creativity, even when I come around to agreeing in the end.

So, if you’ll forgive me, I want to explore notions of line — line mostly as it is generally described and discussed in design classes, but more particularly as it works in quilted art. [ed. note: This turned out to be more of an essay than I had intended. If you wish, you can just look at the pretty pictures.]

Painted Hills Bluff, detail (Work in Progress)

Line is important in design, particularly, of course, in drawing. It moves the eye, evokes feelings, defines or suggests shape, can make value and depth, and can be varied to vary its expressive quality. In quilted art, line functions in all these ways, but can have a weight and value different from that found in drawing and is far more inportant than line is in painting. In conventional photography, line seems to have minor function, but art photography often makes extensive use of line.

Originally the quilting line was structural and functional. Over time, its usage in the US acquired certain conventions and standards (probably because of dressmaking conventions and county extension agents). The convention was that quilting stitches should be small and even, that the back thread should be hidden by burying it in the middle layer of batting, that regular patterns of grids, feathers, florals, stitch-in-the-ditch, and echo quilting were sufficient designs for the quilted stitch.

However, as artists took up stitching fabric and making quilted art, the conventions quickly gave way to attention to design elements, and the quilted line began to evolve. It became as important to the visual effect as the more obvious surface design.

The quilting line can be of many colors and weights, and decisions about whether to choose a hue similar to the background or to pick a complementary hue, whether to use a thin embroidery weight thread or a thick yarn sewn from the back, all became tools with which the artist could work.

Shore Pine. detail

Some stitching is meant to be unobtrusive, to push the background back. The basic stitch that serves this purpose is called a stipple stitch, which varies in its character and shape but has as its purpose flattening and giving an all-over appearance to the stitched area.

Arabesque, detail

Line, as we know, describes shape, and the quilting line can also serve this purpose. It can describe a contour or outline a shape. A shape echoed by a quilting line has a clarity about it that is pleasing. It can be a kind of shorthand for a more thoroughly painted out form.

Above Cant Ranch

However, the stitched line can also serve to contradict the shape, to pull and distort it, and in this, it serves the purpose that only an impasto line of paint can serve.

Updraft

And the extended use of the echo stitch, a continuing of the contour, enlarges and makes fir outward movement. In the example below, the image is relatively static, but given movement by the stitching. The regular spacing of the stitched lines reminds me of etchings, but the shadowing and puffing of the fabric can only be done in textiles.

The Dream

And a quilted grid or regular figure behind a painted surface can help control or change the emotional weight of the surface figuration:

Ms Patsy

The quilting line, like the lines found in drawings and paintings, can be implied as well as obvious. They can provide movement around the canvas, following the implied lines.

Zen View Red

The direction of the line, as design instructors have told us since time immemorial, can indicate peace (centered/horizontal), calm vitality (vertical), or movement (diagonals).

The Mother of Us All, Detail

The quilting line, in short, is extremely expressive — as it varies in its tight or looseness, the weight of the thread and the density of the application, the curve or flow or jaggedness or griddedness or angularity — it can enclose or jolt, dance or confuse.

Interior: all Silk

Line can even be overlapped until it becomes shape — traditional etchers were masters at this, and the use of embroidery in quilt art can likewise make its own forms.

Pussy Willow

A few other ways line is used — for perspective:

Montana Garden

And for suggestions of ideas or emotions, not quite clear but highly evocative:

Mrs. Willard Waits, detail

Finally, part of the difference between the line on the canvas or paper and the line in a quilted surface resides in the textured quality that only quilting can give. A quilting line makes a shadow because it pushes the quilt sandwich into itself and puffs the non-quilted space outward, shading the edges. A quilted line engaging the abutting cloth makes shading and modeling of its own accord. It isn’t merely a moving dot, it becomes a swath across the surface of the cloth. It make air palpable; it creates folds of meaning and desire where only color existed before.

Clothesline, Detail

Miocene, detail

What part does line have in your work? Hanneke used an exquisite line around the edge of the open peach, a line that feels precisely right. Sunil is moving away from line into more painterly work. Steve is abstracting his photographs until line and shape become predominate.

For me, as enamored of stretched canvas and oil paints as I am, I still find enormous power in the stitched quilting line. .

Painted Hills Bluff, work in progress (see the pins?)

I use two different schemes when it comes to color, the theoretical and the practical.
My theoretical cap comes on when I want to think about a hue, its tint or shade and its relationship to other hues in the color continuum. The practical dominates when I am holed up in the basement busy with a painting.

A useful way to think about color and relationships is the visualization of the Munsell color cylinder. I tend not to use the traditional color wheel as it does a poor job of letting you visualize the colors when presented in a continuum that we see around us in nature (plus I think it has outlived its usefulness a long time ago – again just my view). Without going into too much detail (you would find details of the Munsell scheme in the ever useful 1966 essay (“Color, Paint and present day painting” in Artforum) by Walter Darby Bannard), here is a brief overview of the color cylinder.

The Munsell cylinder is an extrusion of a modified color wheel consisting of five principal hues (no primaries in Munsell) with the circumference of the cylinder marked off with specific divisions of these hues, their intermediates and visual complementaries.

A little schematic that I prepared to understand the scheme sometime back.

The long axis of the cylinder specifies the value of the hue (specifically the lightness or darkness of the hue with a value of 0 at the bottom denoting black and a value of 10 at the top of the cylinder denoting white). In order to denote the saturation or the degree of intensity of a hue in this space, Munsell makes use of a superellipsoidal surface to model this cylinder to accommodate for the fact that some colors could have higher orders of saturation than others. Hence what we end up with is an elegant continuously-variable-radius cylinder that enables us to precisely locate and visualize naturally perceived color.

A vertical slice from the cylinder. Note the reds becoming pinks as we travel up the value scale in the cylinder. Note that the reason for the ‘bulge’ in the ellipsoid is due to higher numerical values on the chroma axis around the middle – so indicative of the natural world. Illustration ripped from the Munsell book.

Of course, it is rare that theory approximates practice. The Munsell superellipsoid cylinder does a poor job of telling you how exactly it is that you mix colors to attain a particular value or how it is that you adjust degrees of intensity to attain required levels of chromaticity. Oil paint being a little bit of a finicky medium makes this problem especially confounding. Oftentimes, I get a nice ‘mud’ color whenever I try and creatively mix paints to achieve a certain desired effect on the canvas. I try and attain a level of insight by obtaining a tube of paint that closely approximates the final mixed color combination that I would like on the canvas with minimal mixing. Of course, like I mentioned earlier, there are only so many unique hues of tubes of paint that I can choose from to get to where I want.

Given the practical difficulties combined with the little time that I have for my painting, I use a little bit of a simplified color scheme in many of my paintings that consists of what I might call a ‘reduced palette set’. As of now, I have managed to stabilize upon two sets of reduced palettes that get me to where I want in the final illustration. A reduced palette set in my view is the deliberate use of a small number of colors that will help you comfortably achieve the desired values and intensities for the hues used for the painting. Bear in mind that this might be a bit formulaic, but each painter can get to where they need to and find ‘reduced palette sets’ that could enhance their individual styles.

I have experimented with two sets (it takes about a year to study all the nuances that come with a particular subset of colors, but it is well worth the effort).

The first set is the one that I use for high-contrast-high-value paintings. Used to develop moods of melancholy in the subjects sometimes, while at other times a serious dourness.

Sunil Gangadharan, ‘The inquiries never seem to subside’, Oil and gesso on masonite, 40″ X 48″, 2007 (painted from picture of a cancer patient getting ready to die)

The reduced palette set consists of the following:
- Raw Umber
- Burnt sienna
- Cadmium yellow deep
- Lemon yellow
- Yellow ochre
- Cadmium red deep
- Flake white
- Alizarin crimson

Most of the shades and tints can be comfortably achieved by minimal mixing with white or Mars black as the case for the value level appropriate for the area in the painting. Of course, blending the transitions between colors on the canvas also helps develop additional harmonies.

The second reduced palette set I have been working on (of late) is the one I developed for lower value paintings that help develop a mood of bathos and nostalgia.

Sunil Gangadharan, ‘Rasa’, Oil and gesso on masonite, 40″ X 48″, 2007 

The reduced palette set here is as follows:
- Ivory Black
- Titanium White
- Indian red
- Raw umber
- Burnt sienna

In a self portrait I had done recently, I decided to venture into the viridians and blues, but decided that I was not experienced enough to sally forth.

The reduced palette helps me put to the canvas what I can theoretically visualize using the Munsell color space described. For me, it is a happy marriage of practicality mixed with the necessary visualizations needed.

How do you visualize color? Do you use any similar color schemes in your paintings and photographs?

In an interview for a quilting magazine recently, I was asked why I liked oil paints. I found myself speaking lovingly about the names of paints — burnt sienna, cadmium yellow, quinacridone magenta, perylene black, French ultramarine.

My response surprised (even) me. I hadn’t actually thought of the names of colors as a reason to like a specific medium. Thinking it over, however, I came to understand why I fell into praising the precisely designated oil paints. And watercolor paints. And even acrylics.

It isn’t the names, charming as I find them, so much as it is that the names signify a specific color that holds fairly true across media and brands.

To understand the hold that standardized pigments have for me, you have to know that I began my color education with textile dyes rather than pigment paints. Once you have struggled with making art with dyes, you find that using pigmented paints seems ridiculously easy.

Here are reasons why dyes are inherently difficult to control.

Dyes form chemical bonds with the fabric; they fill up dye “receptors.” (Pigments coat and sometimes stain fabrics but they don’t form chemical bonds.)

Dyes will change color depending upon the temperature (ambient as well as liquid), the amount of time they have to react, the particular color and strength of the dye (which can also be altered by age), and/or the way you hold your tongue when you apply them.

Different fiber reactive dye colors “strike” the fabrics at different rates (and also attach to different fibers, say cotton and silk, at different rates and with different hues). This strike rate means that some dyes, like magenta, will produce color faster than others; if the dye is a mixture of colors, the fastest striking dye will take up most of the dye receptors in the fabric and therefore not be able to be dyed over regardless of the strength or depth of color any dye laid over it is. And some dyes travel further along the fabric than others, so the reach or wick of one color could be much longer than the reach of another, even given the same consistency of liquidity.

With fiber reactive dyes, temperatures have to be maintained at a constant state and should be no lower than 75 degrees F and no higher than 95 degrees F. You can compensate for lower temperatures by increasing the time a dye is allowed to set, but different colors of dyes have different requirements, so what works for fuchsia doesn’t work for turquoise. And higher temperatures of water or air will kill the dyes before they have time to react (except for magenta….)

So here’s what can happen when the bully dye fuschia (magenta) attacks the fabric: This mixture looked like a purple when it was in solution.

Of course, a great deal of the joy of fiber reactive dyes comes precisely from precisely this inprecision. If you drop a bit of yellow into an already (blue) dyed cloth, the yellow will wick out in unexpected and beautiful ways. Most domestic dyers work toward this kind of indeterminate never replicable, often delightful, result. Then they cut the fabric making use of only such parts of it as work for their needs.

If you use wax as a resisting agent, as batik dyers do, you can achieve relatively precise markings with your paintings as well as tight control over line making and wicking. Stencils, stamps, and screen printing, good for replicating imagery, can also be used for very precise effects. And occasionally an artist will be able to control her materials and environment so precisely that she will be able to brushpaint representational scenes with dyes, using a thickening medium to control flow and wicking. However, the thickener lightens the color, so it’s difficult to get intense dye paintings.

The less good dyers, among whom I include myself, play with the dyes, allowing their indeterminate results to emerge senedipitously. I can’t control the temperature in my dye studio, which is almost always under the recommended 75 degrees F; I am cavalier about how long I allow my batched dye paints to sit and get fixed. I measure with teaspoons rather than weighing the dye stuffs. I throw salt on top my dyeing fabric. All this makes the results variable.

But without the ability to control the environment, with a certain amount of impatience, and without the kind of temperament that loves precision and planning ahead, I have found that I am ultimately dissatisfied with dyed effects. I now want my tools to work in expected ways, so the creativity comes out of my fingers and mind. I find myself loving pigment — for its precision of color, for its ability to make fine as well as crude marks, for its lack of variability in moving across the surface of the support, for its sheer immediacy.

Dyeing is a joy and has a lot of advantages for textile use, but for the immediate rush of pleasure in making art, I’ll take pigment.

The best reference for beginning and intermediate dyers can be found on Paula Burch’s website:

Paula lists the pure (unmixed) procion MX fiber reactive dyes along with the names various manufacturers give them: this list helps in achieving both the color desired and resisting unwanted strikes and wicking.
She also has a good discussion about the differences between paints and dyes

But just for comparison, here are some details of a cotton textile that I’ve painted rather than dyed. I don’t think I could achieve these results with dyes, even with fullest knowledge, patience, and methodical controls: