Nothing can stop painter I Nyoman Gunarsa

Nothing can stop painter I Nyoman Gunarsa

I Wayan Juniartha, The Jakarta Post, Denpasar, Bali

Everything has been anything but easy over the last two years
for noted Balinese painter I Nyoman Gunarsa.

A recent court case forced him to travel into the dangerous
and uncharted territory of the legalities and complexities of
copyright.

After filing a police report on several people, including a
politically influential Denpasar-based gallery owner, for
allegedly producing and distributing fake Gunarsa paintings, the
57-year-old painter faced a legal backlash: a libel lawsuit filed
by the gallery owner.

Yet, the most difficult moment for this dynamic founder of the
powerful Yogyakarta-based artists group Sanggar Dewata Indonesia
was when a paralyzing stroke hit him. Not once, but twice. The
first attack took place last year and confined him to a hospital
bed for days. His right hand, the one that for decades had been
regularly stroking the canvas and giving life to many beautiful
paintings, was weakened by the attack and prevented him from
working for almost one year.

A year later, when things seemed to be getting better and to
some extent Gunarsa had regained control over his right hand, the
second attack struck. At that point, many people in Bali's art
community believed they might lose him forever.

But Gunarsa is not the kind of man to surrender easily or
quietly to life's challenges. He fought back. And did it so well
that many people find it difficult to forget his battle of will
against his ailment.

"In his almost incomprehensible voice he kept trying to
communicate his ideas to people. And he stubbornly and
continuously asked for more paper on which he forced that right
hand to sketch something, anything, in an apparent attempt to
maintain his skill," the owner of Darga Gallery, Jais Hadiana
Dargawijaya, recalled when she visited Gunarsa in his hospital
bed.

To Gunarsa, the attacks proved to be a defining moment in his
life. If anything, the stroke has made him a stronger man, and
most probably a new painter.

"I did not end up dead. Obviously, God has another plan for my
life. I went through that painful time and came out as a man with
a new understanding on the meaning of life, and the relation
between the physical body and the transcendental soul of a human
being," Gunarsa said.

Eventually, that understanding became a new source of
inspiration for Gunarsa, and later led him into a new period in
his never-ending quest for artistic exploration.

Gunarsa described that based on the thematic content of the
paintings, most of his works from 1960 to 1970 could be
categorized as the Academic Period, 1970 to 1980 as the Offerings
Period, 1980 to 1990 as the Aringgit (Wayang or puppet) Period,
and 1990 to 2000 as the Dance Period.

"I called the new period that was born out of my newly
acquired understanding of life the Moksa Period, a period in
which I strive to liberate myself from any artistic limits, and
to create freely," he said.

In Balinese-Hindu belief, Moksa is the highest state of
enlightenment, where the individual soul (Atma) merges with the
all-loving, all-forgiving universal soul of Paramatma (the
creator). It is said that those who attain Moksa are be able to
take their physical bodies with them when they leave this world.
It is also said that a person can attain Moksa not only after
death but also during his or her day-to-day life here on earth.
This attainment is called Jiwa Mukti.

"I comprehend Moksa not as an end but an ever-flowing process
through which I artistically exploit any elements, colors and
skills I have known before to freely create beautiful
representations of this world on canvas," he said.

Some 40 aquarelle paintings of this Moksa Period will be
exhibited at the Piazza Gallery in San Francisco's Sausalito area
from Oct. 25 to Oct. 31. It will be Gunarsa's fifth solo
exhibition in the United States.

The second exhibition was scheduled to take place at New
York's Agama Gallery from Nov. 7 to Nov. 14, but the recent
tragic event in New York has forced both Gunarsa and the gallery
to postpone the exhibition until March 2002.

The works retain many of Gunarsa's earlier symbols and
representations, such as elegant Balinese female dancers and a
dynamic and brightly colored Barong for instance. But there is
less detail and the colors are lighter and brighter. Most of the
works also do not possess the symmetrical-composition that was
repeatedly exploited by Gunarsa in his Aringgit and Dance Period.
The strokes, dots and brush strokes seem to have been executed in
a light-hearted, spontaneous and free manner.

"The Moksa Period is the result of an evolution of all my
previous works; elements, symbols, colors, experiences merged
into a unified source of new creativity. The suffering I endured
was the trigger, the source of creativity that gave birth to
these works," Gunarsa told.

In short, the works are both new and old at the same time, and
in a sense are a definite representation of the 2001 Gunarsa, the
artist who found that near-death, hardship and misery blessed his
life with the sweet taste of spiritual liberation.