Artist Teguh frees students from prison of lines<\/p>\n
By Mehru Jaffer<\/p>\n
JAKARTA (JP): Until recently Jeannette Bijlmer was an
\nexpatriate wife wondering what to do with her spare time.<\/p>\n
Her husband's job brought her to Jakarta 10 years ago, seven
\nyears of which she spent assisting in charity work, having
\nlunches and coffee with other wives like herself and hopping from
\none workshop to another in the hope of finding a pursuit that
\nwill further enrich her life.<\/p>\n
\"I was still wondering what to do with myself when I met
\nTeguh,\" explained Bijlmer, 45, as she escorted The Jakarta Post
\non a tour of a 10-day exhibition that opened here in late April.<\/p>\n
After that meeting three years ago she gave everything else up
\nto concentrate on art. For an entire year she practiced just
\ndrawing the outline of the human body in charcoal. Then she was
\ngiven clay to make sculptures of the nude models that pose every
\nday for all students at Galeri Teguh.<\/p>\n
It was only after many more months of practice in Chinese ink
\nand learning how to shade her drawings to give a three-
\ndimensional effect that Bijlmer was allowed to work on canvas.<\/p>\n
Today she is one of Teguh Ostenrik's most senior students.
\nAlong with Ade Artie and Eliana Thorpe, she is exhibiting a total
\nof 28 canvases, some as large as 125 cm by 100 cm, which
\ncelebrate the human body, both male and female.<\/p>\n
In fact Taksu Raga, the title of the exhibition, is taken from
\none of her paintings. It is a large 100 cm by 100 cm torso of a
\nwoman who seems to proudly thrust all that she has out to the
\nworld. Shades of white and gray contrast with yellow on the
\ncanvas, allowing the torso to live up to its title of inner
\nenergy of the human body.<\/p>\n
From the nine paintings Bijlmer has on display, five were sold
\non the opening night, making her optimistic of one day realizing
\nher dream of being able to paint like her teacher Teguh -- in the
\nabstract.<\/p>\n
Teguh's success as a teacher lies in his age-old belief that
\nto master the human form is to be able to draw anything. He
\nteaches students to concentrate on capturing the arm's movement
\nright to the fingertip, without losing sight of proportionality
\nand never forgetting that contours change depending on the way
\nlight falls on the body.<\/p>\n
Convinced that everyone is an artist, Teguh does not hold
\nback from imparting everything he knows about drawing to each of
\nhis students, whether they are bored housewives or mere
\nhobbyists.<\/p>\n
Models<\/p>\n
His is perhaps the only studio in the city that provides live
\nmodels for students to draw.<\/p>\n
Thirty-year-old Yadi, who is one of the nine models working at
\nGaleri Teguh, says that he does the job to be able to earn some
\nextra income for his wife and three children. And he has the full
\nconsent of his wife to do so.<\/p>\n
At first he was shy about exposing his entire body but,
\nafter observing the seriousness of the students, he has come to
\nlook upon it merely as a job.<\/p>\n
It was a French student who first defied the taboo and posed
\nnude at the gallery. Since then others have followed, inspiring
\nbudding artists to fill up canvas after canvas with rippling
\nmuscles stretched over jagged bone structures and lines delving
\ninto the nook and cranny of every conceivable curve and crevice
\nin the human body.<\/p>\n
After countless practices at illustrating the human body,
\nstudents are expected to enter a pitch-black room where they must
\nput to paper the human form purely from memory.<\/p>\n
Another technique is getting students to use both their left
\nand right hands to draw. This is the stage when students are
\nencouraged to stop imitating life and to begin using their
\nimagination in their own individual way.<\/p>\n
When Teguh returned to Indonesia in 1988 after 16 years in
\nEurope, the Javanese painter had already liberated his work from
\nthe constraints of lines and figures. He studied fine arts at
\nWest Berlin's Hochschule der Kunste and discovered that his own
\ninterests were not restricted to the physical form of humans
\nalone, but also to the behavior and thoughts of individuals.<\/p>\n
He realized that to express a mood he had to go beyond
\nrealism. He took to expressing the inner landscape of his
\nsubjects through masks above bodies made up of boxy, abstract,
\ngeometrical forms, with great emphasis on color.<\/p>\n
He returned home with abstract works like Komposisi Kuning I,
\nII, III ('Yellow Composition I, II, III') that attempted to
\nexplore ideas through colors, instead of figures with tones
\nranging from sunny yellows to oranges and saffron. At that time
\nmany artists in Indonesia still painted pretty pictures of
\nvolcanoes and voluptuous women.<\/p>\n
\"Everyone here thought that I was playing with colors because
\nI was not able to draw life-like figures,\" Teguh smiles.<\/p>\n
Despite the sniggers, Teguh set up the C-Line Gallery, named
\nafter his daughter Celine and also as a play on the Indonesian
\nword selain, or that which is different. The idea was to create
\nan environment here where contemporary trends and thoughts could
\nbe explored.<\/p>\n
An opportunity to lecture in Singapore revived his own
\ninterest in figurative painting. He felt that the best way to go
\nback to basics was to start teaching. It is now four years since
\nTeguh first began to give visual art instruction. He also trains
\npeople in performing arts, such as slow motion dance movements,
\nand video art.<\/p>\n
One emotionally charged experience was a workshop he held for
\nstudents at the fine arts department of Trisakti University, soon
\nafter the shooting of students outside the university campus in
\nMay 1998. The surviving students were emotionally paralyzed. One
\ngirl, Maria, from the photography class had a cousin who was
\nraped during the terrible riots that followed the shooting.<\/p>\n
It took her three months to talk about her feelings to Teguh
\nand at the end of the workshop she made a film that showed a hand
\nrepeatedly crushing, squashing and destroying a flower after
\nwhich red blood is shown trickling down the wrist.<\/p>\n
The knowledge that art was able to provide the young woman
\nsome kind of relief from the demons in her head is the source of
\nthe greatest satisfaction for Teguh.<\/p>\n
The exhibition is at Jl. Gaharu 1 No 3, Cilandak Barat, South
\nJakarta, daily from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m. until May 7. Inquiries,
\nphone 7656565.<\/p>",
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