Dr Entropy's House o' Batik & Tie-Dye
This part of the website is in development and will be very graphics-heavy. I just got a new digital camera and have started shooting seriously in May 2002, so I should have much more of this side of the house built by July or so... stay tuned...
I started experimenting with batik and tie-dye techniques while living in Ithaca, New York in 1973 and have continued working in this area on some level ever since. My attraction to both batik and tie-dye was an early sign that chaos and unpredictability would soon become the focus of my life.
My work is not at all representational and are as much of a surprise to me as they are to folks who see them for the first time as finished pieces. Many of my pieces that I am still working on were first begun in the late 1970s and early 1980s so at this point I truly have no idea what I had in mind when I began working on any particular piece - set and setting have largely driven my designs over the past 30 years.
I pretty much stopped working completely after a late graduation from college in 1990 as a Mechanical Engineer and entering my current career as an engineering consultant, but have recently set up my batik shop for the first time in a decade and have begun clogging my drains with wax and staining my house with fiber-reactive dyes once again - it feels good to be making a mess once again!
Below are some links to photographs of my work and to some of the folks who have been my mentors and inspiration over the years. If you are a fiber artist who creates hand-dyed cloth and you happen to find my work interesting, feel free to email me at
DrEntropy (at) smwhisky.com.
Here are some initial links to get this page started:
A wee bit of my work:
Early Batik (1973 -
1978)
The Busy Years - Batik (1979 - 1986)
The "Professional" Years (1987-2001)
The Yet-unclassified Years (2001- )
The Amateur Aerial Photograph Project (1990 - ongoing)
Mentors / Sources
Hundertwasser
Porcella
Wells
Fractals
Chaos
Last update on 1/15/2004