Made Wianta's energy dances across his canvases

Made Wianta's energy dances across his canvases

By Margaret Agusta

DENPASAR, Bali (JP): Made Wianta rarely sits still. He's a
ball of energy waiting to explode into creativity. And even he is
not aware in which direction the blast of energy will surge.

Some days his energy dances in jagged, staccato lines of black
across pieces of white paper or scraps of cardboard. Other days
it splashes onto his canvases in brilliant flashes of color. And
on still other days it slithers and slides through notes jotted
in haste across ticket stubs, receipts and newspaper
advertisements. Sometimes his energy accomplishes all of these
things in one day.

These bursts of creativity can occur throughout the day as
something triggers an artistic response in Wianta. And almost
anything could set him off.

"I seek inspiration every moment," he told The Jakarta Post
during a recent interview at his studio home in the Tanjung
Bungkak area of this tourist resort town.

"I respond to something and I do something with it," he said
as he jumped up, looked around and pointed at the chair he had
been sitting on.

He studied the oval of wood with an oval carved into its
center, which was set into the back of the chair, and ran to a
small cupboard for a container of acrylic paint and a brush. He
then proceeded to paint a white oval in the center of the
backrest and then added tiny dots of white paint between the
raised area of the carving and the edge of the wooden oval,
giving the decorative element of the chair a whole new dimension.

"I always have a response," he grinned as his eyes darted
around the room once again, settling on a fire extinguisher,
which he said looked like a bird to him. He then explained how he
would take the ordinary everyday object and add circles for eyes
and other geometric forms, like triangles, for feathers and
wings.

"I always work by taking advantage of my responses to what I
see," he said.

This process is not limited to objects he sees around him. His
own drawings and paintings take their final forms through
inspiration derived from the process of setting line and color
into place.

"I respond to what I have put down," Wianta explained as he
rummaged through another cupboard for some pieces of paper and a
pencil.

"More often than not I work freely. I am always fishing for a
strong response," he said as he held the pencil loosely like a
dalang puppeteer would hold the handles of the wayang shadow
puppets.

He stood as if poised to swoop down upon the paper he had
placed on a table, then his hand moved swiftly to scrawl
spontaneous graphite lines cross its surface.

"I respond to what I have put down," he said as he scrutinized
the marks he had made. He studied the spontaneous lines a moment
and made a few more, before pausing again.

"You know, this could be a fish," he said as he turned the
paper around to gain the full visual impact of the form that he
had unconsciously scribbled into being through lines that crossed
and entangled.

Then he set the pencil to the paper again in a few jerky lines
that emerged as eyes, fins and scales. A fantasy fish grinned up
from the paper briefly, before being transformed into a sharp-
toothed monster in the next few moments as Wianta continued his
spontaneous process of response and counter-response.

Wianta is in the habit of working spontaneously and quickly,
spewing out a large number of sketches in a short period of time.
"I have no control," he said of his spontaneous creations. "If
there is an error, it's there."

He wastes no time. He is constantly creating. "I have to work
every day," he said of his impetus to create.

"I don't understand how other people express themselves, but I
have always enjoyed working in this way. Every day. It is an
obligation. It finishes that day and the next day it all starts
again," he said.

He carefully saves the drawings produced in his daily
sessions, documenting his creative process, while creating a
store of possibilities that he may work with further in the
future.

He says it is not unusual for him to return to a spontaneous
form that emerged in one of his drawing sessions as a source of
information and inspiration for a larger, more complex work of
art.

"With paintings, control and analysis creep in because the
process is longer," he explained of his larger, more complex
works of art.

Beginnings

Unlike many Balinese contemporary painters, Made Wianta began
his exploration of visual art through the kind of formal academic
training advocated by the educators of the West.

Made Wianta was born in 1949 in the village of Apuan in the
Tabanan highlands of Bali. His father, Gde Labdana, was priest of
the Pura Pucak Padang Dawa, a temple famous for its barong, the
divine protective beasts of Balinese religious tradition.

Wianta's childhood was spent amid nature, magic, living gods
and dance. He began studying dance with his father and performed
as a baris warrior dancer.

In the book, Wianta, Jean Couteau, a sociologist graduated
from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in France,
writes that: "To Wianta, the arts of words and music, of gestures
and images, were all sacred manifestations of a godly presence
which comes down into a man as holy taksu, inspiration."

Couteau explains that it was Wianta's many years as a dancer,
during which he studied under the "giant of dance", Nyoman Kakul,
that strongly influence the artist's approach to painting today.

"To a certain extent Wianta's painting technique is dance: he
leaps and hops and brushes the canvas in a staccato manner. It is
a physical experiment that produces a highly dynamic approach to
the canvas, very different from that of traditional Balinese
painting," Couteau writes in Wianta.

But Wianta was not destined to remain a dancer, even though
his earliest encounter with the static painting style of Bali in
the Balinese village of Ubud, where the practice of sitting
almost immobile and painting with only the tips of the fingers
did not appeal to the active grade school boy, made him decide to
continue to study dance. His obsession with visual art was to
begin much later.

In the changing world of Bali that Wianta grew up in, even the
son of a priest attended school. After finishing grade school in
Apuan, Wianta wanted to learn more and registered at a junior
high school 12 kilometers away in Marga. It was here that he
first encountered formal training in drawing. The lessons exposed
him to a completely new perception of reality. Wianta was taken
into the world of objective reality by Balinese teachers who had
been educated in the modern school of thought of the West.

But dance remained Wianta's focus. He had experienced the
excitement of performing and wanted to expand his knowledge in
that area. After junior high school, Wianta enrolled at the KOKAR
Secondary School of Dance And Music. But he was soon disappointed
at the repetition of what he already knew in his classes.

New directions

He dropped out of the dance program and registered at the just
opened Indonesian School of Fine Art, which was on the same
premises as the dance school, without really knowing exactly what
he wanted to do.

At KOKAR Wianta had met up with the past of Bali; at the
school of fine art, he met up with modernity. The cultural
environment was more national than local, with teachers from all
over Indonesia, Java in particular.

This school's curriculum reinforced the basic training in
drawing that Wianta had experienced in junior high school. Art
was approached scientifically. Divine inspiration merged into
human expression.

Wianta became fascinated with the systematic analysis and
application of color, form, space and line. He also took the
opportunity to explore the possibilities of a wide variety of
materials, such as wood, paint and canvas.

This was the beginning. Wianta's post-high school studies at
the Academy of Fine Arts in Yogyakarta on the island of Java were
to carry him many steps further on his way to becoming a painter.

The academy contributed a wealth of new information and
images. Wianta was exposed to the painting styles of
Impressionism, Surrealism and Fauvism. Wianta studied the images
set forth in these and other styles which he found in books. His
education in art history was primarily a visual one because the
books he had access to at the academy were often in foreign
languages he did not understand.

Gradually he came to understand the meaning of modernity and
modern art. At the Yogyakarta academy he was to experience batik
making. Batiking would give him the freedom to manipulate form.
He would then combine this freedom with a mastery of color to
make his presence felt in the world of art both domestically and
abroad.

But dance continued to lure him, and he continued to perform.
Wianta actively danced and taught and served as the head of the
local Balinese cultural association called Saraswati. It was
through Saraswati that he met Intan Kirana, the granddaughter of
Ki Hajar Dewantara, the founder of the famous Taman Siswa school.
This intelligent and beautiful young woman would later become his
wife.

It was also in Yogyakarta that books led him to a fascination
with the western world and he began studying English. When Wianta
was offered work at an Indonesian restaurant in Brussels, he took
it. Wianta left for Europe in June 1975. He was to live there for
two years, the second year with Intan Kirana, whom he went home
to marry and bring back to Europe at the end of his first year.

While in Europe Wianta also made and exhibited batiks and
danced. And when he was not working, he haunted the museums and
galleries in the center of Brussels.

When Wianta returned to Indonesia he fully understood that
painting, in whatever form it might take, was a truly
international medium. But he was also convinced that Balinese
tradition was an integral part of his vision as an artist.

After a brief sojourn in Yogyakarta, he moved to Karangasem in
eastern Bali in 1978. In Kamasan, 30 miles away, he was to enter
the world of Balinese traditional painting. The Balinese way of
seeing was revived in the young artist, and he became aware of
the genius behind the stilted forms of Balinese painting. He
seized the possibilities of the essence of Bali and let the
ancient and the modern inspire him to new heights as an artist.

"I went and gained knowledge first, then I returned to the
rhythm of the tradition of Bali," Wianta told The Jakarta Post.

"In Balinese art there are all kinds of lines and circles and
spirals. There is a rhythm like dance (in the visual arts)
because Balinese dance has to do with circular motion.

"I learned about rhythm and line. It is the movement of dance
that I try to bring forth," he said of his experience in
Karangasem.

It was there that Wianta emerged as a mature, productive
graphic artist. He expressed the beliefs of a Balinese boy and
the dreams of a modern universal man in complex and striking line
drawings in stark black and white.

After a short time, Wianta moved his family (Intan and he now
had a daughter) back to Yogyakarta where he completed his studies
in 1980 and his works began to catch the attention of critics.

In 1981, Wianta returned briefly to Europe to renew his
contacts there, and then settled in Denpasar.

Wianta was establishing himself in the Indonesian and
international art worlds with his combination of Balinese detail,
which filled his paper with surrealist shapes emerging from his
youth in Bali and his western academic training.

"I fell in love with black and white. But it was also a matter
of practicality. I could express myself anywhere, even in the
street, with black and white on paper," Wianta says of his
drawings.

He has never found black and white boring or monotonous, "The
blacks you get from different materials vary in quality. They are
not the same," he said. But as always, the artist was restless
and continued his exploration into color and the immense
possibilities it provided.

Up to 1984, Wianta had done little with color other than when
he was working with batik. He had known very little about color
until he discovered Kamasan, where he researched materials and
pigments. So, when he found he was nearing a point where his
store of imaginary shapes was dwindling, he turned to color as a
logical consequence of his studies of space composition.

Astounded at the visual possibilities opening up with the
shift to color, Wianta has continued to explore the world of hues
and tones.

As Jean Couteau says in Wianta, this artist has succeeded in
reconciling "Balinese memory and modern freedom. He is the
creator of new Balinese shapes and colors."

Fire painting

Over the years, the images emerging in Wianta's works have
changed and shifted to range from the surreal monsters of his
Balinese dreams to stark black and white calligraphic works
inspired by both Bali and Japan. And then on to tiny dots of
color interacting with each other as well as with large areas of
solid color over a huge expanse of canvas, sometimes with the
addition of geometric shapes, such as triangles, whose placement
creates the dynamic tension of movement. And most recently, on to
experimentation with the possibilities of installation art.

At the end of June this year, Wianta painted in fire across
the darkened sky in the Affandi Museum compound in Yogyakarta in
a brilliant expression of the freedom that installation art
provides the creative artist. He had strung up bamboo, rope and
other materials in a carefully calculated design, before setting
the installation afire to achieve a truly amazing impact against
the evening sky. His photographic documentation of this piece is
impressive.

On top of all this, Wianta is also planning an artistic
journey into cyberspace. According to Tiras magazine, a Japanese
communications company, which will be sponsoring an exhibit of
Wianta's paintings next year, also plans to assist the artist in
documenting his works on CD-ROM.

And yet even with these possibilities, the possibilities of
the world of visual art cannot fully contain the creative impetus
and talents of this dynamic, restless artist.

In October of this year Wianta plans to have a collection of
his poetry edited by poet Afrizal Malna published in a volume
tilted Korek Api Membakar Lemari Es (The Match Burns Up the
Refrigerator).

"I never had the pretension of being a poet," Wianta said of
his writing. I just enjoy jotting things down almost anywhere.
Rather than doing nothing, I must be doing something. I must
work," he told the Post.

"But you can't define my writing as poetry in the usual
sense," he said as he piled several carefully documented bundles
of papers filled with notes and sketches done on all sorts of
materials, ranging from ticket stubs to receipts, on the table in
his studio. He has produced more that 600 such "poems" since
1993, and has a large number of others he has saved over the
years.

"Like my drawings, I have lost a lot of them as time has
passed," he said. "I have been doing this sort of thing since I
was in junior high school, but I didn't understand the value of
documenting at the time. I used to sell the paper the drawings
and writings were on by the kilo so that I could buy used
clothes," he said of his years as a struggling student.

Despite the fact that he rarely finds time to dance now that
he has achieved immense success as a visual artist, Wianta has
never forgotten his first love. He has established a foundation
for the preservation of traditional Balinese dance-theater.

The Wianta Foundation, which his wife Intan Kirana helps to
manage, supports the activities of traditional dance-theater
performers with funds provided through a grant from the Ford
Foundation of the United States.

It is the hope of Wianta and Intan, who also has a strong
background in dance, that this support will help preserve the
ancient art form which has been waning in popularity in recent
years.