Crackle lines in batik: a flaw my mother taught me to keep
In hand-drawn batik, after the wax is applied and the cloth goes into the dye, the wax sometimes cracks. Dye seeps into the cracks and leaves fine veined lines across the pattern. Some makers try to avoid it. My mother taught me to welcome a little of it, because it shows the cloth went through the hands and the dye bath, not a printing machine.
Twice this year a buyer returned a cloth as defective because of the crackle. And here is the strange part: cheap printed "batik" from factories now often reproduces crackle lines on purpose, as a design, because buyers associate them with the real thing.
I have been reading about the Japanese tea tradition, where Sen no Rikyū preferred plain, rough bowls to perfect imported ones, and about the idea that imperfection and impermanence are where beauty lives because that is how things really are. It is a beautiful idea. But I am not sure it explains my crackle.
When I love the crackle, is it because it shows impermanence and accident, the way the tea writers say? Or is it simply because it is a sign of the hand, of authenticity, and I would love any sign of the hand? And then what is the printed crackle: a lie, or just another pattern?