Advertisement
Published: February 26th 2014
Edit Blog Post
My first lesson in Balinese art;
see the painting, with more, at https://www.facebook.com/GillianPerrettArtist?ref=hl I showed some views of Ubud sixteen posts ago. I returned there in June 2012 and paid what must be my 4
th or 5
thvisit to Ubud, mindful of the town’s fame as the centre of Balinese art. I bought some traditional paintings there twenty-five years ago, and this year visited with the intention of studying the art properly.
I head the name Bali for the first time back in London in the Swinging Sixties. A girlfriend recounted how, travelling the ‘Hippy Trail’ she and a friend arrived in a new place and were dropped off at the market. She said that the king looked out of his palace and sent a servant to fetch the visitors to stay in the palace: which they did … for at least a week. She described a paradise and my imagination was captured, but I didn’t make it to Bali for another thirty years. Because she’d spoken of the king I assumed the story was about the capital, Denpasar, but when I went there I couldn’t m believe the story. For a start, it was far too modern a city to have had a king with such traditional values only thirty years before; also
... and my second.
see this one too, with more, at https://www.facebook.com/GillianPerrettArtist?ref=hl. the Royal Family was revered for committing ritual suicide in front of Dutch invaders back in 1906.
This year in the Museum Puri Lukisan, Ubud’s principle art gallery, I stumbled upon a link that explained both Balinese Art and my friend’s lovely story: in the same photograph! Although a small island, Bali did not have just one king. It consisted of a number of kingdoms and the Royal House of Ubud had outlasted Dutch occupation.
I found accounts of the life of Tjokorda Gde Agung Sukawati (1910-1978), the grandfather of the present king, a renaissance man who had been active in many fields of public life. A panel in the Musim Puri Lukisan (Fine Arts Museum), which he founded in the 1950s, records,
He opened the Puri to foreign guests. Two of the guests would later become his close friends, Walter Spies and Rudolf Bonnet. This was breakthrough because back in those days the Puris in Bali had closed their doors to outsiders. ... Robert Kennedy and Queen Juliana of the Netherlands .
It was this hospitality to visitors that he extended to my friend and her travelling companion. A 1971 photograph
My second teacher
is a well-known artist; this is his own work in the Musim Puri Lukisan. in the museum shows him posing on a Vespa bike with a European woman riding pillion. The caption is TGAS posed with a tourist showing his humility and friendliness, regardless his status is a king. My friend’s story was confirmed, even though it wasn’t her face peering over the shoulder of the rider.
Agung Sukawati founded the Pita Maha Artists’ Association in 1936 as a result of the friendships he formed with European artists he welcomed to Ubud in the 1930s, Walter Spies (German, 1885-1942) and Rudolf Bonnet (Holland, 1895-1978). The Balinese have art in their veins. They wove fine cloth and used it to paint wall hangings; they painted puppets and decorated buildings with intricate carvings, but they didn’t know picture painting in the Western way. The visiting artists provided examples and friendship; Chinese merchants sold paper; the Pita Maha school was born. The artists supplemented ink with natural pigments suspended in tempura, lead pencil and gold. Their subject matter and style is unmistakably Balinese. The greatest draftsman was I Gusti Nyoman Lempad (1862-1978), the architect and stonemason who built most of Ubud’s public buildings and produced hundreds of paper drawings of Balinese folklore and mythology
in his old age.
World War II and Japanese occupation inflicted a hiatus (and occasioned the death of Spies). In the 1950s the Young Artists Group established itself around the Dutch artist Ari Smit (b.1916). Like Smit, this group used bright modern paints and interpreted the local scene with naïve enthusiasm.
Art is a thriving business in Bali these days. Traditional painters, tourist painters, personal painters, visiting painters all crowd out the small shops where I bought my first examples. There is room for all and the streets are crowded with art and artists. I went to three different Balinese teachers and took something different away from each of them. I joined sketching and painting groups at Pranoto’s gallery, another private gallery, the Agung Rai museum, and the Musim Puri Lukisan. I spent a lot of time looking at the art in these last two galleries, as well as in the Neka Museum. I've placed some more of the art I made on this trip at https://www.facebook.com/GillianPerrettArtist.
Travel Hints
Agung Rai Museum,
http://www.armamuseum.com/ Museum Puri Lukisan,
http://museumpurilukisan.com/ Neka Art Museum,
http://www.museumneka.com/ Pranoto’s Art Gallery,
http://www.age.jp/~pranoto/ I stayed in a simple
Painting by local artist
in the style of Walter Speirs, Neka Museum. motel-style room with verandah, one of two in the garden of a private home for A$10.00 a night. An artist friend’s advice was, “Don’t go back to the same place next year as it’s certain to have fallen into disrepair. It’s best to arrive in the morning and look around for something that is newly painted out.”
Advertisement
Tot: 0.096s; Tpl: 0.018s; cc: 13; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0441s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Ray W
non-member comment
Thanks for keeping me in the itinerary...
What a treat to see a blog post of your travels this morning. It made me want to ditch this winter wonderland I am living in and head west. Hope we can talk more about your trip the next time we chat.