Laura Pritchard’s signature style, which is colorful, luxuriously detailed, and simply drawn yet sensitively characterized, would not be possible without her skill in batik. In Pritchard’s iteration of the ancient Indonesian medium, she paints on stretched silk using French dyes and a molten wax resist that results in idiosyncratic, contemporary portraits. Her women smile or dart glances out of the frame, their skin a glowing orange or alternating shades of aquamarine. Behind them, unidentifiable landscapes dance; there might be four horizon lines, a neon yellow tree, or a checked moon.
Pritchard’s work contains endless dichotomies. The technique is antique but the imagery modern. Hieroglyphic-like symbols recur in the paintings, and it is clear that the artist's influences are culturally and geographically varied, but Pritchard herself is an American working in the US. Her pictures are in-depth portraits, yet they contain entire fantasy realms. As the artist herself says, “My work is a reverent, poetic approach to creating interesting and detailed worlds on silk.”