Artist Teguh frees students from prison of lines
By Mehru Jaffer
JAKARTA (JP): Until recently Jeannette Bijlmer was an expatriate wife wondering what to do with her spare time.
Her husband's job brought her to Jakarta 10 years ago, seven years of which she spent assisting in charity work, having lunches and coffee with other wives like herself and hopping from one workshop to another in the hope of finding a pursuit that will further enrich her life.
"I was still wondering what to do with myself when I met Teguh," explained Bijlmer, 45, as she escorted The Jakarta Post on a tour of a 10-day exhibition that opened here in late April.
After that meeting three years ago she gave everything else up to concentrate on art. For an entire year she practiced just drawing the outline of the human body in charcoal. Then she was given clay to make sculptures of the nude models that pose every day for all students at Galeri Teguh.
It was only after many more months of practice in Chinese ink and learning how to shade her drawings to give a three- dimensional effect that Bijlmer was allowed to work on canvas.
Today she is one of Teguh Ostenrik's most senior students. Along with Ade Artie and Eliana Thorpe, she is exhibiting a total of 28 canvases, some as large as 125 cm by 100 cm, which celebrate the human body, both male and female.
In fact Taksu Raga, the title of the exhibition, is taken from one of her paintings. It is a large 100 cm by 100 cm torso of a woman who seems to proudly thrust all that she has out to the world. Shades of white and gray contrast with yellow on the canvas, allowing the torso to live up to its title of inner energy of the human body.
From the nine paintings Bijlmer has on display, five were sold on the opening night, making her optimistic of one day realizing her dream of being able to paint like her teacher Teguh -- in the abstract.
Teguh's success as a teacher lies in his age-old belief that to master the human form is to be able to draw anything. He teaches students to concentrate on capturing the arm's movement right to the fingertip, without losing sight of proportionality and never forgetting that contours change depending on the way light falls on the body.
Convinced that everyone is an artist, Teguh does not hold back from imparting everything he knows about drawing to each of his students, whether they are bored housewives or mere hobbyists.
Models
His is perhaps the only studio in the city that provides live models for students to draw.
Thirty-year-old Yadi, who is one of the nine models working at Galeri Teguh, says that he does the job to be able to earn some extra income for his wife and three children. And he has the full consent of his wife to do so.
At first he was shy about exposing his entire body but, after observing the seriousness of the students, he has come to look upon it merely as a job.
It was a French student who first defied the taboo and posed nude at the gallery. Since then others have followed, inspiring budding artists to fill up canvas after canvas with rippling muscles stretched over jagged bone structures and lines delving into the nook and cranny of every conceivable curve and crevice in the human body.
After countless practices at illustrating the human body, students are expected to enter a pitch-black room where they must put to paper the human form purely from memory.
Another technique is getting students to use both their left and right hands to draw. This is the stage when students are encouraged to stop imitating life and to begin using their imagination in their own individual way.
When Teguh returned to Indonesia in 1988 after 16 years in Europe, the Javanese painter had already liberated his work from the constraints of lines and figures. He studied fine arts at West Berlin's Hochschule der Kunste and discovered that his own interests were not restricted to the physical form of humans alone, but also to the behavior and thoughts of individuals.
He realized that to express a mood he had to go beyond realism. He took to expressing the inner landscape of his subjects through masks above bodies made up of boxy, abstract, geometrical forms, with great emphasis on color.
He returned home with abstract works like Komposisi Kuning I, II, III ('Yellow Composition I, II, III') that attempted to explore ideas through colors, instead of figures with tones ranging from sunny yellows to oranges and saffron. At that time many artists in Indonesia still painted pretty pictures of volcanoes and voluptuous women.
"Everyone here thought that I was playing with colors because I was not able to draw life-like figures," Teguh smiles.
Despite the sniggers, Teguh set up the C-Line Gallery, named after his daughter Celine and also as a play on the Indonesian word selain, or that which is different. The idea was to create an environment here where contemporary trends and thoughts could be explored.
An opportunity to lecture in Singapore revived his own interest in figurative painting. He felt that the best way to go back to basics was to start teaching. It is now four years since Teguh first began to give visual art instruction. He also trains people in performing arts, such as slow motion dance movements, and video art.
One emotionally charged experience was a workshop he held for students at the fine arts department of Trisakti University, soon after the shooting of students outside the university campus in May 1998. The surviving students were emotionally paralyzed. One girl, Maria, from the photography class had a cousin who was raped during the terrible riots that followed the shooting.
It took her three months to talk about her feelings to Teguh and at the end of the workshop she made a film that showed a hand repeatedly crushing, squashing and destroying a flower after which red blood is shown trickling down the wrist.
The knowledge that art was able to provide the young woman some kind of relief from the demons in her head is the source of the greatest satisfaction for Teguh.
The exhibition is at Jl. Gaharu 1 No 3, Cilandak Barat, South Jakarta, daily from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m. until May 7. Inquiries, phone 7656565.