Christie's works: Light and shadow on bamboo

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.