Pacita explores the spirit with trapunto paintings

Pacita explores the spirit with trapunto paintings

By Parvathi Nayar Narayan

JAKARTA (JP): Pacita Abad's colorful personality and paintings
are not unfamiliar to the Jakarta art scene. She exhibited her
work here two years ago with Wayang, Irian and Sumba.

In Exploring the Spirit, her new show, there is some familiar
work, namely the continuation of the wayang series. Most of the
work on show this time is abstract, however. These include series
like Expanding the Surface (1982-1996), Oriental Emotions and the
beautiful Oriental Abstractions. She sees in abstraction the
chance to experiment with color and texture in their purest
forms.

The Oriental Abstraction series, intriguingly, grew from
experimenting with the form of the rice stalk. While in Korea
(1993), Pacita decided to try her hand at the traditional form of
Korean brush painting. As part of her training, Pacita was
required to paint a stalk of rice again and again. This was
designed to perfect her stroke and technique, but Pacita was more
drawn to the form of the rice stalk itself. She decided to push
herself to the limit with this one form, setting herself the task
of painting the same design on canvas after canvas.

The motif that emerged ultimately was a completely abstract
interpretation of the original, in work like To Die For and
Butterflies done in a trapunto style.

Trapunto -- the word is derived from the Italian trapungere
which means to stitch and stuff. It is a term coined by the
artist herself to describe a unique style that incorporates paint
on canvas with appliqued fabric, stitching, padded and quilted
effects and a variety of objects like mirrors, shells, and beads.

Pacita Abad has worked with different media like paper, bark,
collage and oils on canvas. The trapunto paintings, though, are
easily the most exciting of her works, tactile, richly textured
and unusual.

Pacita's works are bright but the colors, while strong, are
often not used in their full primary intensity, but as tints and
shades that allow for a harmonious interplay. And, of course in
the trapunto paintings, it's the textures that predominate.

Incidentally, Pacita enjoys conducting trapunto workshops for
children and young adults -- whose energy she says she finds
stimulating. One of her most interesting trapunto workshops was
at the University of the Philippines (1991). She had asked her
students to bring whatever material they liked that could be
incorporated into a trapunto painting. Because of the needlework
involved, some were skeptical of how the male students would
fare.

"Do you think boys can't sew? Oh yes they can!", she
exclaimed, going on to say that the boys were exceptionally
creative. They brought bits of bark, typewriter ribbon and
cassette tape with which to stitch their paintings together.

Exploring the Spirit features around 90 paintings, of which 30
are large works. To give some indication of sizes, Fiesta (1990)
is 233 x 143 cm and Layers of Earth (1990) is 94 x 49 inches. (An
earlier work, The Medicine Man, was about 250 inches high,
literally capable of covering a wall.)

Size plays a important role in the way her work impacts; there
is the sensation of being enveloped, since at viewing distance,
one's entire field of vision is taken up by the painting.

The show also showcases Pacita's fondness for the wayang form.
She was attracted to Indonesia's wayang puppets on her very first
visit to Indonesia in 1983. She liked the color, the sense of
surviving tradition where the teaching of moral values was via a
story, even the use of the medium "... like a newspaper" as
social commentary. She has been painting them ever since.

Besides, her own understanding of their characters has
deepened, and many are like old friends revisited and
reinterpreted.

In the process some old paintings get reworked or re-energized
too. She points to one work in progress, saying that the wayang
character depicted in it is getting "... groovier all the time. "
The early somber tones and dominant blacks have been replaced
with bright colors and appliqued batik.

One of Pacita's new perceptions of the wayang is to look at
them like masks, thus incorporating some of the elements from her
Masks series. There is in these a subtle commentary, perhaps, on
life itself, in which most people have dual images of how they
are and how they reveal themselves to the world.

A new addition to some of her work are frames. Earlier the
artist had eschewed the use of frames, preferring her paintings
to look like wall hangings. She felt that this made them more
accessible to the viewer and less elitist. Recently though she
has been experimenting with frames covered with material like
batik, that support the painting without detracting attention
from them.

Pacita is very pleased with the results as, "... the batik
frames make them complete paintings. "

Pacita Abad sees the role of a painter as a social and
political commentator. It is a point of view in which her own
upbringing, in a family with strong political leanings, must have
been influential. She has spent time in refugee camps in
Thailand, and painted a series on Cambodian refugees.

Immigration Experience, another series, tackles the issues
involved in leaving the country of one's birth and going
elsewhere. Some of her most political paintings, however, were
those protesting the excesses of Marcos.

In a career littered with exhibitions at prestigious venues,
The American Dream, a solo at the National Museum of Women in the
Arts, Washington D.C. (1994) still stands out. This museum is
practically one of its kind, devoted to the study of women
artists in the history of art, about whom the world knows so
little even today. The museum also promotes modern and
contemporary female artists. Pacita Abad was the first female
artist born in Asia to be honored with a solo there.

Being in Indonesia is something Abad enjoys, for she has more
time in which to paint, and has also found her colors becoming
stronger and brighter here.

How has she grown in the years between her two exhibitions in
Jakarta?

"I am more energized now, more challenged, more open to
experimenting," she says.

Pacita Abad exudes energy and enthusiasm as she talks. Her
words are punctuated by an earthy laugh, or by the stamping of a
foot or a wave of her blue painted fingernails. I sit opposite a
table from her, a table decorated with yellow orchids and straw
colored wine that tones with the artist. She is dressed in beiges
enlivened by sequin work on the batik top, her hair flowing down
her shoulders, wearing dangling earrings put together with
pearls, gold and lots of other little bits and pieces.

It occurs to me as I look at her that I could be looking at
one of Pacita Abad's trapunto paintings...

Pacita Abad's Exploring the Spirit is from July 11 to July 28,
at Gedung Pameran Seni Rupa (the National Gallery of Indonesia),
Jln. Medan Merdeka Timur No. 14, Central Jakarta.