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.