Silk Painting How to

Silk Embroidery from Silk Cloud Brocade Museum in Nanjing,China

Perspective

This quarter’s issue features landscape artists and I’m impatiently waiting it’s arrival. The Plein Air exhibits I’ve found intriguing are the ones that illustrate a journey as well as a beautiful rendition of an outdoor scene. This journey idea brought my attention to our silk history which in and of itself is a rich historic landscape.  

I’ve been browsing through my photos of the Silk Cloud Brocade Museum I visited in Nanjing, China. I was impressed by the thousands of years and countless artisans who devoted their lives,heritage and in some cases the success of entire empires to silk. Using silk history resources, I have taken snippets of history,approximately 1000 years apart, to illustrate the amazing development of silk. 

 2640 BCThere’s a wonderful tale of the Chinese Empress, Leizui,who in 2,640 BC, discovered silk fiber when a cocoon dropped into her tea cup. She began to unravel the 900 meters of silk fiber and dreamed of weaving it into cloth. Legend has it that she was known as the goddess of silk. She directed the development silk from raising silkworms to weaving these magical fibers into a luminous fabric.

1640 BCOne of the earliest examples of genetic engineering started with the domestication of the Mori Bombyx silk moth.

The production of silk was a treasured secret of Chinese for 2,500 years. Because of its rarity and labor intensity, silk became a luxury reserved for royalty or wealthy.  Only royalty or those honored by the Royal Houses were allowed to wear silk.

500 BCTheSilk Road toward the west was opened by the Chinese. Camels, yaks and as many as 100-500 people spent about one year traveling 5,000 miles. It was never a single route but a network of desert tracks and mountainous trails. Silk at this time was worth it’s weight in gold. By 300 BC, China’s great wall had been completed.

200 AD Many other countries had,by this time, developed their own silk production; however, China was able to maintain a strong hold on silk since sharing secrets outside  the Sericulture was punishable by death. There are examples of inventive industrial espionage such as kidnapping silk workers, and by smuggling silkworm eggs in the hollow canes of visiting monks. 

640 AD China armed their ambassadors with gifts of silk for all the Royal Houses along the Silk Road. This clever promotion of silk to the royalty of India,Russia,Persia, Arabia, Egypt, and Europe, created a demand for silk thus skyrocketing its value. 

1609 King James I, who was obsessed with silk, sent silkworms and mulberry seeds to colonial Williamsburg in hopes of creating his own silk empire in the new world.

1740 Silk was exported from Philadelphia & Savannah to England. The silk exportation was abandoned when indigo and cotton and tobacco became more lucrative and easier to produce.

1840 Although Chinese royalty had produced brocade for centuries, Joseph M. Jacquard developed woven textured silk with the use of patterned punch cards which was a forerunner of the computer.

Disease and infection in a silkworm colony was common but during this time. Louis Pasteur found the source by developing a way to test female moths for the disease. 

1869The gypsy moth was imported to Massachusetts to be cross-bred with the Bombyx mori.The idea was that the Gypsy/Bombyx cross would be easier to raise. Some of these tent caterpillars escaped causing problems, to this day, across North America.

1880 The Canadian Pacific railways, dedicated trains to carried only precious Japanese silk to eastern mills. These heavily guarded freight trains,with superior track rights, stopped only to change locomotives and crews,which they completed in under five minutes.

1930The market crash of 1929 and the following depression decimated the market of luxury silk. Japanese fleets transported their silks via the Panama Canal to New York  undercutting the cost of the specialized trains. 

Silk has since made a slow recovery into our lives only to be mimicked by synthetic fabrics of lesser quality. 

1996 Silk Painters International was founded by Jan Janas and Diane Tuckman.

Today We are the lucky recipients of vast treasury of ancient silk artisans’ contributions to the silk culture created 4000 year ago. This is far from a complete story of silk, therefore it's up to us to contribute more treasures to the history of silk.

References.