Christie's works: Light and shadow on bamboo

By Benito Lopulalan

DENPASAR, Bali (JP): "I've grown up with bamboo, in Georgia," Allison Christie said at the Agung Rai Museum of Arts in Ubud where she is exhibiting twenty water colors, all depicting bamboo in light and shadow. Since the paintings depict bamboo in Bali, they also contain her emotional expressions about Bali. In one of her paintings (Offering, 1995) she depicts an old Balinese woman giving an offering in the shadow of some bamboo. In another, she paints two penjor (roadside decorations for festivities). "They are both strongly related, the nature of bamboo and the culture of Bali," she said.

Besides her strongly realistic nature embedded in the paintings, shadow and light are obvious in almost all of the works. By their existence, subjects in her paintings are related to each other, seeming to communicate with each other. Shadows of leaves cling to the bamboo's stalks, or the bamboo's shadow touches an alang-alang (grass) roof.

In her writing, with Sheila Elliot, Christie says, "Like a passel of lively youngsters, light and shadow don't stay still for a moment -- leafy branches move and sway, the sun peeks in and out of clouds, light dapples and dances over the scene." Indeed, for Christie, shadow and light are painted to represent the movement of objects. However, it delivers more. The shadows, in themselves, create a relationship between the framed subjects and the unpainted surrounding environment: the sun and the clouds above.

Shadow and light are also intentionally drawn for composition purposes. Symmetrical balance annoys her, so she places her subject off-center, balancing the weight with color and shadow in other areas. "First, I always paint in the head," she says. Painting with water colors is intrinsically difficult since the colors cannot be piled one on another to cover mistakes. Unplanned paintings are especially impossible for realist paintings such as hers. "These kinds of paintings have to be well-planned," she says. However, this is not without exception. The painting, The Chair of God, is her only surrealistic painting, depicting a blue bamboo chair, and was painted instinctively. "I first had the feeling to paint a blue bamboo chair, and afterwards, I let the feeling lead me until it was finished." This painting is dedicated to Bali, "not only the place, but also the people."

The painter has lived and painted in Columbus, Georgia, since 1964. Although primarily self-taught, her works have been included in numerous national, group and solo museum exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Columbus Museum of Arts and Sciences (Georgia), the Macon Museum of Art, the Blount Collection in Montgomery, Alabama, and in the 50th Anniversary Selection of the YKK corporate collection in Kurobe, Japan.

Nature and bamboo are new subjects to Christie's paintings. She has spent years painting man-made objects. Old seaside chairs, Japanese kimonos, old buildings and her favorites, old green houses. "I love old things," she smiles. There are many green houses in her place back home, the kind which were built at the beginning of the century. Now those buildings are abandoned, and the weather has stamped them with age, weathered wood, or broken windows. As in her bamboo paintings, she paints them with her strong technique of light and shadow.

Compared to subjects from a man-made environment, is painting a natural element such as bamboo different? "Bamboo painting has many things to do with emotion," she says. According to Christie, to paint bamboo needs more emotion than she has used before. But this emotion is also made up by her own expectations of Bali. "Things and people that I've found in Bali are greater than my expectations."

In March 1994, a copy of Architecture Digest, with a picture of a bamboo bedroom in Bali in it, came her way. "I was inspired by reading the article," she said. The artist wrote to Linda Garland, owner of the house in Digest's cover story. "I admire her for what she is doing to introduce bamboo as an alternative to wood, to help stop the deforestation taking place on this planet," Christie recalls seriously of her first encounter with Bali's bamboo. The letter worked better than hoped. She was invited to Bali to paint on Garland's property. She met well- known Balinese artist, Agung Rai, and now, has her first exhibition in his new museum.

More than a thousand people wrote to Linda Garland because of the article in the Architecture Digest, but Christie was the only correspondent to be invited to stay at the complex. "When I first came to Bali and went to Linda's place, I was crying because the nature in Bali is so beautiful," she said. "When I left Bali, after my first visit, I was crying because the people are so beautiful."

Her exhibition opened on June 17, coinciding with the opening of the fourth Bamboo congress in Bali.

Together with her twenty pieces are paintings from a collection of Balinese artists owned by the Agung Rai Fine Arts Gallery. Of her own paintings Christie says, "If I do a lot of mistakes in my painting, that's my fault. If I make them good, that's not my reaching. It's led by God." Bamboo has become a gate for her recent reflections.