BALI IS A MELTING POT OF CULTURES AND TRADITIONS
synopsis on Arts & Crafts and list of Museums / Galleries
As their designs followed strict aesthetic and religious guidelines, the artists generally didn’t have much room for personal expression. With the arrival of European artists in the beginning of the 20th century, this soon began to change. Local artists started to develop their own individual styles.
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Photo courtessy of Tiarreza Sjam |
As their designs followed strict aesthetic and religious guidelines, the artists generally didn’t have much room for personal expression. With the arrival of European artists in the beginning of the 20th century, this soon began to change. Local artists started to develop their own individual styles.
PAINTING
Until the start of the 20th century, the dominant form of painting was the portrayal of Hindu epics by painters and illustrators called ‘Sangging’. Aside from making large representational paintings, the ‘Sangging’ were expected to decorate everything from gourds, wooden altars, bamboo vessels, headboards for princely bed chambers and, in particular, they were expected to illustrate astrological wall hangings on bark paper or cloth. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that western influences reached Bali. The use of Asian symbols in the works of, among others, Paul Gauguin, Toulouse Lautrec and Camille Pissaro, created a new trend for Asian-influenced art and for European painters to move to Bali. Ubud’s fame regarding art can be traced to the arrival of the German painter Walter Spies and the Dutch Rudolf Bonnet. There is a much wider range of artistic styles today.
Ubud Style
Influenced by the western use of perspective and everyday-life subject matter, the Ubud style is one of the most ‘expressionistic’ of all Bali’s schools. Despite this, Ubud’s art still retains many traditional features, including attention to detail and stylized characters.
Batuan Style
Strongly wayang based (puppet). This style involves hundreds of intricately painted representations of Balinese life, filling every available nook and cranny of the canvas.
Keliki Style
Keliki paintings measure 20cm by 15cm. They contain scenes of mythical and Ramayanic characters engaged in battle, good versus evil, on sinister backgrounds.
Pengosekan Style
From this village, on the outskirts of Ubud, a new style sprang up during the 1960s. It concentrated on just a few natural components, such as birds, insects, butterflies and plants.
Stone Carving
Stone carvings were mainly used to decorate temples and palaces. There is little difference between the iconography decorating temples and that of private buildings. Gateways represent the dividing line between the inner and outer worlds and as such are the recipients of some of the most fantastic carvings. Bali’s modern-day centre of stone carving is the village of Batubulan, situated halfway between the towns of Denpasar and Ubud.
Textile
One of the most striking things about Bali is the rich variety of cloths and materials that are to be seen in thousands of shops throughout the island. However, only a small proportion of these are indigenous to Bali. The myriad of batik clothes and sarongs available everywhere, are mainly imported from Java. Bali does have a very rich textile industry of its own. The beautiful Songket fabrics, worn by performers of traditional dances, are a good example. In Songket gold and silver threads are woven into the cloth to create complex motifs of birds, butterflies and flowers.
Endek, or weft ikat, is another common method used in Bali. In weft ikat weaving, the weft threads are dyed to create the design and are then woven with plain warp threads.
The least common form of weaving to be seen in Bali is the Geringsing, or double-ikat, and it is perhaps the most sought after. In Geringsing both the warp and weft threads are dyed to their final designs before being woven together. With the exception of certain areas in India and Japan, this weaving technique can only be found in the small Bali Aga village of Tenganan, East Bali.
Wood Carving
Wood and stone carving have traditionally been featured largely in temple and palace architecture. Immaculately carved demons and mythical beings decorate pillars, door panels, lintels and window shutters with the object of protecting the buildings from evil intruders. Scenes of legendary figures placed within a floral décor, set a more pleasant and educational tone.
With the arrival of European influences, wood carving started to develop along more innovative and commercial lines. Today, whole villages specialise in producing certain styles of work. The village of Mas, near Ubud, is the best known for its carvings of female figures, Buddhas, characters from Hindu epics and the traditional topeng (mask) and Wayang Wong masks.
ART ATTACK
 THE 3-DIMENSIONS OF ASIE.ONE
BY Olli Fraenkel
At Ganesha Gallery,
Four Seasons,
Jimbaran Bay
Open daily from
9am – 6pm.
Phone: 0361 701010
From 9th February
– cocktail opening
from 6.30pm – 8pm
Since the arrival of the first wave of young surfers in the late 1960s, Bali has become not only a major international surf destination but also a creative centre of surf culture and art. It was the surf that first brought German artist Olli Fraenkel to Bali and has kept him here. The startling designs that typify surf culture and art as seen on surfboards and clothing trace their origin to several diverse sources. Graffiti started as a way for urban youths to express themselves in neighborhoods like the Bronx in New York. It rose to prominence during the rise of hip-hop culture. The first real graffiti artist was Taki183. He worked as a foot messenger in New York City and wrote his nickname (also called tag) around the New York City streets that he frequented during the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a dedicated graffiti artist producing works under the pseudonym of asie.one, Olli explained his youthful urge to spray paint the dull grey predictability of his birthplace with vibrant colors and designs. His passion for spray-painting murals remains, but of late, he has begun painting on canvas as well as concrete. The dynamic results show yet another face of his alter ego asie.one and in a sense unifies his diverse disciplines into one. Using mix media to great effect his works such as "Sunshine" is surprisingly complex yet refined without losing movement. From the viewpoint of large murals these works are Olli's equivalent of graffiti miniatures. The connection of his persona and Indonesia are eloquently summed up in the comment, "The vast cultural similarities and divides between the islands of Indonesia truly inspired him to venture deeper into his love of the world of art, and to share his style of artwork with communities".
 GREY LINES
By Noella Roos
Painting and Drawing
Dance and Video performing
by Ida Ayu Indah Tejapratami
At Gaya Art Space, Jalan Raya Sayan, Ubud
Ph: + 62 361 979252 / 979253
Email: artspace@gayafusion.com
From: February 4th – cocktail opening at 7pm
Daily hours: 7am – 11pm
Noella Roos (born 27 January 1969, Amsterdam) is a Dutch painter and drawer. Born into a family of artists, her talent was nourished and stimulated from early childhood. In this artistic environment Noella was given every chance to fully develop her visual qualities. As a result her paintings and drawings betray a classical and technical basis that is seldom seen in the current generation of artists. At the Dutch art academies, after all, personal development is strongly placed before mastery of technique. Noella Roos chose her own path, averse to the ongoing 'trend'. Her drawings are inspired by Michelangelo, Käthe Kollwitz, Andrea del Sarto and also Dooijenwaard. Noella lets dancers dance to music in her studio on Bali, and then draws these dancers while in motion with compressed chalk on white paper. She prefers chalk because it is an 'honest' medium: the resulting drawing is either good or bad; you cannot change or erase parts.
Ida Ayu Indah Tejapratami (born 6 July 1988) is the dancer and makes choreography from improvisation, feelings and traditional Balinese dance. She has danced in many different countries; Japan, Madrid Spain, Beijing China and every week in Gunung Sari Gamelan group, Peliatan-Ubud, Bali. Ida Ayu Indah Tejapratami will translate The Legong dance, with the help of video and more abstract lines from the drawings, into a contemporary Legong dance in the surrounds of by Noella Roos' sketches.
 Art Infinitum
By Jan Tyniec, Joel Singer,
Linda Connor,
Lonnie Graham,
Made Wianta and Vladik Monroe
At Tonyraka
Art Gallery
Jl. Raya Mas 86, Ubud
http://www.tonyrakaart
gallery
.com/Exhibitions-Art
-Infinitum-2012.asp
Until February 3rd
At the time the daguerreotype was invented in the 1800s, painting was the primary art form. In an era that is often referred to as pictorialism, photographers began to make their photographs look like paintings. In their efforts to bring photography closer to painting, photographers combined technological innovation with creativity through various messy experiments in order to achieve soft focus and painterly effects, such as hazy light. In 1888, George Eastman introduced the first Kodak camera that contained film-roll with the famous slogan, "You press the button, we do the rest". Since then, photography has never lost its popularity. Since the 1960s, thanks to the efforts the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, especially its Director of Photography, John Szarkowski, photography has obtained the status of high art or fine art. Photography has become recognized as singular, authentic, work of art on a par with painting, sculpture and other art forms. In the 1980s, photography found a place in video installations, a new media that transformed "art". The arrival of digital photography transformed "art" even further. Along with other new media and the Internet, the use of image manipulation with digital devices has reinvented photography and redefined the art of photography. As technology advances, photography and videography are becoming one, and the melding of the two different media will determine the future of photography.
Quoted by Arif Bagus Prasetya.
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