Czech-born artist discovers her calling in face of Buddha

Czech-born artist discovers her calling in face of Buddha

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): She came here as an optometrist but will
probably return home as a painter.

Maybe it is not that much of a contradiction between her past
and present occupations. Czech-born Simone Willimann-Novotny
claims that she continues to care for the eyes, except that it is
the inner eye which interests her much more these days.

She fell head over heals in love with the Buddha about a
decade ago -- today Willimann-Novotny has painted heads of the
Amitabha, another name for the Buddha, that have been
displayed at many exhibitions, including a current show being
held at Hotel Borobodur in conjunction with its 27th anniversary.

During her travels, Willimann-Novotny noticed that the
features and clothing of the Buddha change from Myanmar,
Thailand, Cambodia, Japan, China to Bali, but what all these
cultures continue to have in common is the tradition of depicting
the Buddha with the eyes closed. This excites her endlessly, as
she tries in her paintings to imagine what lies beyond the
lowered eyelids of the enlightened one.

It was the sylvan surroundings of Bali, where she lived in the
early 1990s with her husband, who is in the hotel business, which
moved her to look within and to express her innermost thoughts
through painting.

"Living in Bali was truly magical to me," Willimann-Novotny
told The Jakarta Post at her studio here, where she sat under the
glow of the inner gaze of dozens of Buddhas from all over Asia.

Bali first transformed her as a human being. Her European
upbringing had taught her to be punctual, efficient and
successful. As a child she was told to take up studies that would
help her to earn a decent living later in life. Bali changed all
that. She learned to enjoy just being with people and to indulge
in simple things like laughing together.

The island where she swears even the air is different,
provided her with plenty of time to sit back and wonder what was
it that she really wanted to do with her life? The luxury of
being able to think about herself instilled in her a kind of
peace of mind and filled her with happiness at the thought that
she now had the choice to spend time in whatever way she liked.

She chose to attend workshops in art that were held under
trees. She went on outings that led her to the strangest corners
of Bali. She met weavers in a village tucked away in the
mountains and watched artists like Sony and Anak Agung Abadi at
work. She spent long hours in conversation about art and life
with the likes of Kartika, a great painter herself and the
daughter of the late Affandi, the greatest of all Indonesian
painters.

With so much to inspire her it was just a matter of time
before she plucked up the confidence and courage to start
painting. Her first work is untitled but she constantly refers to
it as "The Monks", and has decided that she will never part with
it. After that she painted whatever she saw and with different
mediums, but it was the numerous visits to temples that
led her to become interested in icons. Eventually it was the calm
and serene look of the Buddha that inspired her art the most.

It was a Buddha from Myanmar that flagged off her Buddha
series and which was sold minutes after it was displayed at an
exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. Saddened at being separated from her
beloved Buddha she has since tried to replicate him, and he can
be seen looking down from above her dining table through a
charming frame made especially for him.

In fact, half of the magic of her Buddhas remain in the
meticulous way she frames all her paintings. Her prayer for each
of her Buddhas simply is that all of them get a good home where
they are loved and respected in return for all the peace and
harmony that they radiate around them.

Now that she is in Jakarta she has found time to study the
various Buddhas at Borobodur temple, who at a glance look similar
to each other but on close scrutiny are quite unique. She
suspects that hundreds of different hands must have gone into
creating each beautiful head. She was at Borobodur temple last
October to visit the "stone knights on the mountain".

While there she watched each statue in black stone attain a
life-like quality at the magical moment when the morning sun
decided to spray its silver rays upon the gigantic temple. She
returned intoxicated by the experience, but also inspired enough
to paint some more.

Willimann-Novotny is speechless and her eyes brim over as the
conversation turns to the recent destruction of centuries-old
statues of Buddha on the stony cliffs of Bamiyan in Afghanistan.
She has been distraught since she first heard about the tragedy;
for her, the Buddha is more than religion. The Buddha is
spirituality, a concept of beauty and joy forever that is not
confined to any one national boundary.

Borobodur and Beyond is at Hotel Borobudur Jakarta, Jl.
Lapangan Banteng Selatan (tel. 3805555) until April 7.