Art is freedom for young artist Shawnee

Art is freedom for young artist Shawnee

By Aendra H. Medita

JAKARTA (JP): It's an unusual, startling self-portrait, where
nothing is plainly visible in terms of form as the artist offers
only the power of colors, composition and firm lines.

That is all that Shawnee Puti makes clearly visible of herself
in Self Portrait II.

It is interesting to observe how this young artist, born in
Jakarta 25 years ago, powerfully conveys the piercing symbolism
in her works, which are on display in Jak@art2001 Gallery on the
ground floor of the S. Widjojo Center, Jl. Sudirman 71, Central
Jakarta, until March 25.

Shawnee has had a uniquely dynamic life, and the seething
restlessness in the strokes she makes with her brush only
intensified upon studying how to paint formally in an art and
sculpture course in New York two years ago.

For her, painting is an expression of freedom in the freest
sense of the word.

"Actually, I do not have any particular concept -- for me,
painting simply flows. When I am in the mood I will pour my ideas
on the canvas. On the whole, my works are the result of this
process. I take painting as a means to express freedom in a very
liberal sense," she said.

"It is through painting that my emotions can be discharged.
And for me, freedom is painting, an emotional freedom which gives
strength for a major goal, namely the work."

So she goes in her adventures in life and painting, following
the waves of her emotion and restlessness. It is out of her great
curiosity that she has resorted to putting all of her adventures
on canvas.

Poet and journalist Goenawan Mohammad noted in his remarks
when opening Shawnee's exhibit that she is an artist fed with a
new energy in her own creative adventure, seemingly unaffected by
what is now happening in the country.

"Emotional waves and restlessness may be part of my journey in
painting because I have a great curiosity, a curiosity which is
free and unfettered," Shawnee said.

Shawnee is exhibiting 21 of her paintings, great in diversity
and at times shocking. These works reveal a spatial contemplation
of a new capacity for the wishes of the artist, the manifestation
of a restlessness about a tumult, either felt meaningfully or
related to the surroundings.

Her pictures give an idea about what is seen within the surge
of power of symbolism. Shawnee's works have other forms that
imply a sublime power in a discourse about herself, where
bitterness, levity and depression become noticeable as one, in
such a way that her works have their own essence. Despite the
brief sparkle of the works, only a subjective tumult is found
within.

Shawnee tries through her art to get close to subjects that
other artists do not touch. These constitute the dynamism of the
lines based on Shawnee's journeys in a number of her works, her
wandering to create paintings based on her spirit and work.

Take a look at Untitled 1998. Here Shawnee glues on the canvas
a long piece of wood she found in New York and then worked on
with yellow, black, red and blue. She added the heads of matches,
a Polaroid photo and the picture of an eye cut from a magazine.
All these things combine into one and are stuck on a white canvas
with the right-side left empty, for the viewer to fill in. That
is her strength.

Sky Eye II shows a head, Shawnee's accent in creating a
collage of paintings with metals and a small mirror used as the
object of an eye. This work obviously differs from her other
paintings, because her spontaneous scrawls makes the head
dominant in the space.

In Self Portrait II, Shawnee is capable of playing with
manipulative symbolization in presenting a self-portrait that is
not conventionally visible, a reason to call this work the
manifestation of alienated restlessness.

In One Without Eye, the composition manipulated is no longer a
symbol but a shocking, rambling use of colors.

In these works, Shawnee shows greater contemplation so that
the impression arising from her adventures can be conveyed with
greater wisdom.

In addition to these works from 1997 to the present, there are
six sketches, a memory of trips to Israel and New York and her
life Jakarta. Although there is nothing particularly prominent in
the sketches, they are more than mere symbols as they go deep
into the artist's own experience, showing her restless heart.

Imaginative, intuitive and with that shocking quality which
arrests the viewer, Shawnee Puti's works do not make for easy
interpretation. But she is delving deeply into herself, and in
exploring her own journeys also challenging observers to look
into themselves.