Painter Melissa Jane brings her powerful works to Jakarta<\/p>\n
By Sarah E. Murray<\/p>\n
JAKARTA (JP): Painter Melissa Jane Ades was sitting in the
\nballroom of the Regent Hotel with Kartika and her family as they
\nbegan the hard work of installing a major exhibition of works by
\nKartika, her father, Affandi, the famous Indonesian modern
\nmaster, and other members of their family. A manager of the
\nRegent walked through, checking on the arrangements, and was
\nstartled. He knew Melissa Jane only as the wife of saxophonist
\nDavid Ades, who is currently playing jazz nightly at the Regent.
\n\"What are you doing here?\" he asked Melissa Jane. Melissa laughed
\nher throaty laugh, roughened by years of cigarette smoking, and
\nsaid, \"I'm a member of the family, don't you know. I just
\nfinished an exhibition at their gallery in Yogyakarta.\"<\/p>\n
It was indeed fitting that Kartika and family were moving into
\nthe Regent to set up their exhibition only a week after Melissa
\nhad left behind the warm embrace of the Kartika family compound.
\nThe Regent has become Melissa's home of the moment, as she, her
\nhusband and her nine-year-old daughter, Amelia, live in one of
\nthe employee rooms of the hotel as David \"blows his guts out
\nevery night,\" as he puts it, bringing jazz to Jakarta.<\/p>\n
Melissa paints in another hotel room, made safe from art by
\nlayers of black plastic covering the carpet and furniture. It's a
\nfar cry from her small Legian cottage in Bali where she would
\npaint on her porch, shaded by fruit trees and the communal
\nfriendliness of her Balinese neighbors.<\/p>\n
She misses her house in Bali, which has become the still
\ncenter in the storm of her life these past few years. However,
\nbeing in Jakarta has its compensations. She has been able to
\norganize an exhibition of 20 of her paintings at the Australian
\nEmbassy, a show that was opened last Thursday by Kartika and will
\nrun until the end of this month.<\/p>\n
She has also begun to dip her toe into the waters of the busy
\nJakarta art world of openings and exhibitions. This dizzy busy
\nworld of openings and social whirls, of talking to journalists
\nand holding press conferences, makes Melissa Jane anxious and
\ncranky, as what she wants to do, and what she does best, is just
\npaint.<\/p>\n
Self-awareness<\/p>\n
As is so often true in people's lives, it took Melissa Jane a
\nlong time to face up to the obvious truth. Already drawing and
\npainting at the age of eight, her budding artistic talent was
\nencouraged by her older sister, who noticed the resemblance
\nbetween Melissa's drawings and European Jewish artist Marc
\nChagall, and bought Melissa a book of Chagall's work.<\/p>\n
Her imagination already set alight by a trip with her family
\nthrough Southeast Asia, as a teenager, she says, \"I had a dream I
\nwould go to Ubud and become an artist. I had a vision there was a
\nwhole artistic community in Ubud, and I would be taken under the
\nwing of an artist there.\" Life proved not to be so simple.<\/p>\n
She dropped out of high school at 15 and worked for three
\nyears in a variety of jobs, including working as a cook on a tuna
\nboat, the first woman to work on the tuna fleet in Australia. She
\ndecided to go back to school to get a nursing certificate, which
\nshe did, and assumed she would go into a career in nursing when,
\non a bit of a lark, she applied to the South Australian School of
\nArt, never dreaming she would get in, as there was quite a bit of
\ncompetition for admission. After sitting for a rigorous day-long
\ntest and living through a personal interview, much to her
\nsurprise she got in, and so left nursing behind for art.<\/p>\n
Unable to enter the painting program and forced instead into
\nthe graphic design program, Melissa was unhappy with school. The
\ngraphic design program was also unhappy with her as she was too
\nmessy, they said, and it would be better for her to go over to
\nthe painting department with all those other people who liked to
\nmake messes. Instead, she dropped out after two years and left
\nfor Europe to view the major art centers there.<\/p>\n
On returning home, she was invited to create a solo exhibition
\nto travel around South Australia, an impressive achievement for
\nsuch a young artist. However, stung by the harsh words of a
\ncritic, she fled the world of painting and entered the fashion
\nindustry. She quickly became successful and well-known with the
\nMelissa Jane label, hand-painted textiles and other original
\ntextile designs.<\/p>\n
Her success in the fashion world always rang hollow to her
\nbecause she was nagged by the knowledge that she really wanted to
\nbe a painter. \"I'll paint later, when I can afford it,\" she
\nalways told herself. That moment never seemed to come. After many
\nyears in the Australian rag trade, she finally made the decision
\nto move to Legian, with the intention of working half-time in the
\nrag trade and painting half-time.<\/p>\n
It was not until she was diagnosed in 1991 with breast cancer
\nthat Melissa bumped up again against the unavoidable truth that
\nshe was made to paint. Forced to recognize that there might not
\nbe a tomorrow in which she could paint \"when the conditions were
\nright\" and encouraged by her new husband, David, she began
\npainting full time again in 1992.<\/p>\n
Many of her most powerful works directly confront her
\nexperience with breast cancer, extended over a difficult nine-
\nmonth period in which she underwent four operations. All of her
\nworks spring from her personal experience.<\/p>\n
For Melissa, painting is not about earning a living (although
\nshe is a professional painter) or making pretty pictures.
\nPainting is an instrument for creating and exploring her life,
\nand, by extension, the human experience.<\/p>\n
Process<\/p>\n
She usually begins, both literally and figuratively, with
\nherself, painting a figure that represents herself. She does no
\npreparatory sketches or drawing on the canvas, she just faces the
\ncanvas, raw, and begins to paint.<\/p>\n
Starting from the feeling she has when facing the canvas, she
\nworks outward, meeting other figures and symbols as she continues
\npainting. She says she usually has no idea what she will paint,
\nand is often surprised by what comes out.<\/p>\n
The resulting canvases are extraordinary in their visionary
\npower and emotional intensity. She uses bright colors and common
\nsymbols (the moon, Christian cross, clouds, stars, cats, people,
\nmosques) to create her own unique visual language. Dense patterns
\nof painted flowers or foliage, and her multicolored ikat skies
\nare reminders of her earlier work as a textile painter and
\ndesigner.<\/p>\n
A recurring character is of a female figure with a gaping red
\nwound where the left breast should be, whose characteristics and
\nexpressions change as a barometer of Melissa's long process of
\nunderstanding the meaning of the cancer in her life.<\/p>\n
Not only the breast cancer series but all of her paintings are
\nintense -- in feeling, color, and theme -- and may not be easy
\nfor some people to look at. They are often about suffering, the
\ndifficult search for god, the failure of faith.<\/p>\n
\"People often say I'm negative. I don't think I'm negative,\"
\nshe says, jabbing her ever-present cigarette into the air for
\nemphasis. \"I think I'm just telling the truth.\"<\/p>\n
In fact, her paintings are not full of doom and gloom. They
\nare full of whimsy, beauty and grace. They are a reminder of the
\nwork of 20th century Mexican artist, Frieda Kahlo, who also
\npainted from personal experience, often of the constant suffering
\nand pain she endured after a serious bus accident left her
\ncrippled and subject to dozens of operations over the course of
\nher adult life. Frieda Kahlo also favored bright and strong
\ncolors, and often referred to folk religious symbols and
\ntraditions, making her own personal synthesis.<\/p>\n
The beauty and grace of Melissa's work comes through in small
\ngestures: the bunch of flowers being thrust by an entering curly-
\nheaded flying angel at the naked female figure raising her arms
\nin hopelessness and self-protection (1994); or an obviously
\nloving male figure holding a sleeping female figure with a
\nBalinese offering in her hand, as they fly over the sea away from
\nthe shores of Bali, while people on the shore and the flying
\nmonkeys above their heads wave goodbye in sorrow at their leaving
\n(Ngerorodan [Kidnapped by Love] 1996).<\/p>\n
Even the most recent work in her cancer series is dominated by
\nthe figure of a woman with closed eyes and a powerful, peaceful
\nface, who holds her outstretched hands above the wounded body of
\nthe floating one-breasted Melissa Jane in a healing gesture
\n(Restoration, 1996). The face and hair of the woman are like
\nMelissa Jane's own, and also mirror the face of the sad, open-
\neyed blue faced woman who looks upward from the lower edge of the
\ncanvas.<\/p>\n
Hands also appear out of the clouds and the edge of the canvas
\nto cover her wounds and comfort her. As the title suggests, the
\nfeeling conveyed by the painting is not one of hopelessness and
\ndeath -- even though the reclining female figure floating in the
\nclouds is in a traditional position of a corpse -- but of healing
\nand a return to life.<\/p>\n
Unusual<\/p>\n
Melissa Jane's work is unusual for a westerner who has long
\nlived in Bali because it does not take up the obvious and common
\nthemes favored by foreigners: the beautiful Balinese landscape,
\nbeautiful Balinese girls, temples, ceremonies, and the other
\nvisual delights of the island.<\/p>\n
Bali sekala (visible Bali) does occasionally appear in her
\nwork in both subtle and obvious ways. A flying female figure
\nholds a small banana leaf offering with flowers; in another
\npainting (Spirits of Indonesia, 1995, oil on canvas) images from
\nwayang (puppet shadow play), a rangda (mythical wicked widow) and
\na barong (dance with mask), along with stupas and a meditating
\nBuddha from Borobudur, float across the landscape of imagination
\nof the two faces that look out at the viewer.<\/p>\n
Rangda and I (1995, oil on canvas) explores the connection
\nbetween herself and the Balinese mythical figure of witchery and
\npower. But the deeper connection with Bali, and also with Java,
\nwhere she lived for over a year, is a spiritual and not material
\nor visual one, as Melissa Jane's painting chronicles an intense
\nspiritual yearning, searching, and experience. The form that her
\nspiritual searching takes, however, is different than that usual
\nin Bali or other areas of Indonesia, where different cultural
\npatterns shape artists' choices and self-conceptions.<\/p>\n
Balinese painters, for example, still ground their work in a
\nstrongly normative culture and society. At the moment, there is a
\nburst of very powerful new style of abstract expressionist
\npainting being practiced by younger painters that marks a
\nsignificant break with the previous visual traditions of Balinese
\nmodern painting.<\/p>\n
Some people might view this abstract style as a very private
\nand personal, individualistic language of the painters. While
\nthis style of painting expresses personal spiritual feelings and
\nexperiences, all are ultimately grounded in the communal Balinese
\nreligious traditions in which all Balinese participate.<\/p>\n
The Balinese painters working in this style say they are
\nstruggling to reclaim the spirit of Bali that has been crusted
\nover by too many years of touristic representations of the
\nBalinese culture.<\/p>\n
In contrast, Melissa Jane comes from a western environment
\nwhere she experiences herself not primarily as a member of a
\ncommunity to which she has responsibilities and which gives her
\nan identity and place in return, but as a free-floating
\nindividual who has to constantly work to \"find\" herself. The
\nself, therefore, becomes the primary medium for spiritual search
\nand expression.<\/p>\n
It is perhaps this that is hardest for many Asians to
\nunderstand: focus on the self need not be the same as
\nselfishness. Melissa Jane's works make clear that she focuses on
\nherself and her experiences and feelings, not because she only
\nthinks or cares about herself, but because it is only through
\nfacing up to herself that she feels she has any chance of finding
\nthe divine, of scratching through the surface of life to the
\ndeeper and more enduring truths.<\/p>\n
Melissa Jane's paintings do bring forward universal themes
\nthat are relevant to all human beings: love, death,
\nrelationships, affection, fear, illness, beauty and ugliness; the
\nsearch for meaning in a universe that can sometimes seem empty of
\nanswers.<\/p>\n
In western countries where individuals, not communities, are
\nthe basic social unit, most people don't have a common tradition
\nthat connects them to a larger whole. What people have is a
\ncommon humanity and common experiences as human beings.<\/p>\n
When looking at work such as Melissa Jane's, this means that
\nrather than relying on established traditions of symbols and
\nmeanings, we must draw from ourselves -- or allow to be drawn by
\nMelissa's paintings -- those feelings and experiences that mesh
\nwith what she has visualized on canvas for us.<\/p>\n
For some, this may be work they don't want to do. Some
\n(including Australians and other westerners) may find the kind of
\npersonal self-exposure in Melissa's canvases embarrassing and
\nshocking and be unable to surpass those feelings to connect with
\nthe work. Some people may only look to art to provide something
\npretty and soothing for their tired eyes, or perhaps to record
\nand immortalize a loved one or treasured object or place.<\/p>\n
But such art, while it has its place, doesn't take art, or us,
\nto the limits. Art has the power to do much more than merely
\nrepresent or recreate the beautiful. For those who live within
\nsocial and spiritual traditions that still absorb and nourish the
\nindividual, like those in Bali and in many Moslem areas of
\nIndonesia, perhaps the need for art that does more than represent
\nthe beautiful or make signs of the faith (such as the
\ncalligraphic paintings that have become so popular here in the
\npast 20 years) is not felt in a significant way.<\/p>\n
For those who come from more individualized backgrounds and
\nare no longer grounded in nourishing geographical and\/or
\nspiritual communities, art can become one of the essential
\nvehicles for spiritual exploration and discovery in an often
\ndisturbingly fragmented and confusing world.<\/p>\n
The paintings of Melissa Jane, on display at the Australian
\nEmbassy until the end of July, give a concrete and moving
\nexpression of that concept, one of the driving forces behind the
\ndevelopment of modern art in the western world.<\/p>",
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