Painter Melissa Jane brings her powerful works to Jakarta
Painter Melissa Jane brings her powerful works to Jakarta
By Sarah E. Murray
JAKARTA (JP): Painter Melissa Jane Ades was sitting in the
ballroom of the Regent Hotel with Kartika and her family as they
began the hard work of installing a major exhibition of works by
Kartika, her father, Affandi, the famous Indonesian modern
master, and other members of their family. A manager of the
Regent walked through, checking on the arrangements, and was
startled. He knew Melissa Jane only as the wife of saxophonist
David Ades, who is currently playing jazz nightly at the Regent.
"What are you doing here?" he asked Melissa Jane. Melissa laughed
her throaty laugh, roughened by years of cigarette smoking, and
said, "I'm a member of the family, don't you know. I just
finished an exhibition at their gallery in Yogyakarta."
It was indeed fitting that Kartika and family were moving into
the Regent to set up their exhibition only a week after Melissa
had left behind the warm embrace of the Kartika family compound.
The Regent has become Melissa's home of the moment, as she, her
husband and her nine-year-old daughter, Amelia, live in one of
the employee rooms of the hotel as David "blows his guts out
every night," as he puts it, bringing jazz to Jakarta.
Melissa paints in another hotel room, made safe from art by
layers of black plastic covering the carpet and furniture. It's a
far cry from her small Legian cottage in Bali where she would
paint on her porch, shaded by fruit trees and the communal
friendliness of her Balinese neighbors.
She misses her house in Bali, which has become the still
center in the storm of her life these past few years. However,
being in Jakarta has its compensations. She has been able to
organize an exhibition of 20 of her paintings at the Australian
Embassy, a show that was opened last Thursday by Kartika and will
run until the end of this month.
She has also begun to dip her toe into the waters of the busy
Jakarta art world of openings and exhibitions. This dizzy busy
world of openings and social whirls, of talking to journalists
and holding press conferences, makes Melissa Jane anxious and
cranky, as what she wants to do, and what she does best, is just
paint.
Self-awareness
As is so often true in people's lives, it took Melissa Jane a
long time to face up to the obvious truth. Already drawing and
painting at the age of eight, her budding artistic talent was
encouraged by her older sister, who noticed the resemblance
between Melissa's drawings and European Jewish artist Marc
Chagall, and bought Melissa a book of Chagall's work.
Her imagination already set alight by a trip with her family
through Southeast Asia, as a teenager, she says, "I had a dream I
would go to Ubud and become an artist. I had a vision there was a
whole artistic community in Ubud, and I would be taken under the
wing of an artist there." Life proved not to be so simple.
She dropped out of high school at 15 and worked for three
years in a variety of jobs, including working as a cook on a tuna
boat, the first woman to work on the tuna fleet in Australia. She
decided to go back to school to get a nursing certificate, which
she did, and assumed she would go into a career in nursing when,
on a bit of a lark, she applied to the South Australian School of
Art, never dreaming she would get in, as there was quite a bit of
competition for admission. After sitting for a rigorous day-long
test and living through a personal interview, much to her
surprise she got in, and so left nursing behind for art.
Unable to enter the painting program and forced instead into
the graphic design program, Melissa was unhappy with school. The
graphic design program was also unhappy with her as she was too
messy, they said, and it would be better for her to go over to
the painting department with all those other people who liked to
make messes. Instead, she dropped out after two years and left
for Europe to view the major art centers there.
On returning home, she was invited to create a solo exhibition
to travel around South Australia, an impressive achievement for
such a young artist. However, stung by the harsh words of a
critic, she fled the world of painting and entered the fashion
industry. She quickly became successful and well-known with the
Melissa Jane label, hand-painted textiles and other original
textile designs.
Her success in the fashion world always rang hollow to her
because she was nagged by the knowledge that she really wanted to
be a painter. "I'll paint later, when I can afford it," she
always told herself. That moment never seemed to come. After many
years in the Australian rag trade, she finally made the decision
to move to Legian, with the intention of working half-time in the
rag trade and painting half-time.
It was not until she was diagnosed in 1991 with breast cancer
that Melissa bumped up again against the unavoidable truth that
she was made to paint. Forced to recognize that there might not
be a tomorrow in which she could paint "when the conditions were
right" and encouraged by her new husband, David, she began
painting full time again in 1992.
Many of her most powerful works directly confront her
experience with breast cancer, extended over a difficult nine-
month period in which she underwent four operations. All of her
works spring from her personal experience.
For Melissa, painting is not about earning a living (although
she is a professional painter) or making pretty pictures.
Painting is an instrument for creating and exploring her life,
and, by extension, the human experience.
Process
She usually begins, both literally and figuratively, with
herself, painting a figure that represents herself. She does no
preparatory sketches or drawing on the canvas, she just faces the
canvas, raw, and begins to paint.
Starting from the feeling she has when facing the canvas, she
works outward, meeting other figures and symbols as she continues
painting. She says she usually has no idea what she will paint,
and is often surprised by what comes out.
The resulting canvases are extraordinary in their visionary
power and emotional intensity. She uses bright colors and common
symbols (the moon, Christian cross, clouds, stars, cats, people,
mosques) to create her own unique visual language. Dense patterns
of painted flowers or foliage, and her multicolored ikat skies
are reminders of her earlier work as a textile painter and
designer.
A recurring character is of a female figure with a gaping red
wound where the left breast should be, whose characteristics and
expressions change as a barometer of Melissa's long process of
understanding the meaning of the cancer in her life.
Not only the breast cancer series but all of her paintings are
intense -- in feeling, color, and theme -- and may not be easy
for some people to look at. They are often about suffering, the
difficult search for god, the failure of faith.
"People often say I'm negative. I don't think I'm negative,"
she says, jabbing her ever-present cigarette into the air for
emphasis. "I think I'm just telling the truth."
In fact, her paintings are not full of doom and gloom. They
are full of whimsy, beauty and grace. They are a reminder of the
work of 20th century Mexican artist, Frieda Kahlo, who also
painted from personal experience, often of the constant suffering
and pain she endured after a serious bus accident left her
crippled and subject to dozens of operations over the course of
her adult life. Frieda Kahlo also favored bright and strong
colors, and often referred to folk religious symbols and
traditions, making her own personal synthesis.
The beauty and grace of Melissa's work comes through in small
gestures: the bunch of flowers being thrust by an entering curly-
headed flying angel at the naked female figure raising her arms
in hopelessness and self-protection (1994); or an obviously
loving male figure holding a sleeping female figure with a
Balinese offering in her hand, as they fly over the sea away from
the shores of Bali, while people on the shore and the flying
monkeys above their heads wave goodbye in sorrow at their leaving
(Ngerorodan [Kidnapped by Love] 1996).
Even the most recent work in her cancer series is dominated by
the figure of a woman with closed eyes and a powerful, peaceful
face, who holds her outstretched hands above the wounded body of
the floating one-breasted Melissa Jane in a healing gesture
(Restoration, 1996). The face and hair of the woman are like
Melissa Jane's own, and also mirror the face of the sad, open-
eyed blue faced woman who looks upward from the lower edge of the
canvas.
Hands also appear out of the clouds and the edge of the canvas
to cover her wounds and comfort her. As the title suggests, the
feeling conveyed by the painting is not one of hopelessness and
death -- even though the reclining female figure floating in the
clouds is in a traditional position of a corpse -- but of healing
and a return to life.
Unusual
Melissa Jane's work is unusual for a westerner who has long
lived in Bali because it does not take up the obvious and common
themes favored by foreigners: the beautiful Balinese landscape,
beautiful Balinese girls, temples, ceremonies, and the other
visual delights of the island.
Bali sekala (visible Bali) does occasionally appear in her
work in both subtle and obvious ways. A flying female figure
holds a small banana leaf offering with flowers; in another
painting (Spirits of Indonesia, 1995, oil on canvas) images from
wayang (puppet shadow play), a rangda (mythical wicked widow) and
a barong (dance with mask), along with stupas and a meditating
Buddha from Borobudur, float across the landscape of imagination
of the two faces that look out at the viewer.
Rangda and I (1995, oil on canvas) explores the connection
between herself and the Balinese mythical figure of witchery and
power. But the deeper connection with Bali, and also with Java,
where she lived for over a year, is a spiritual and not material
or visual one, as Melissa Jane's painting chronicles an intense
spiritual yearning, searching, and experience. The form that her
spiritual searching takes, however, is different than that usual
in Bali or other areas of Indonesia, where different cultural
patterns shape artists' choices and self-conceptions.
Balinese painters, for example, still ground their work in a
strongly normative culture and society. At the moment, there is a
burst of very powerful new style of abstract expressionist
painting being practiced by younger painters that marks a
significant break with the previous visual traditions of Balinese
modern painting.
Some people might view this abstract style as a very private
and personal, individualistic language of the painters. While
this style of painting expresses personal spiritual feelings and
experiences, all are ultimately grounded in the communal Balinese
religious traditions in which all Balinese participate.
The Balinese painters working in this style say they are
struggling to reclaim the spirit of Bali that has been crusted
over by too many years of touristic representations of the
Balinese culture.
In contrast, Melissa Jane comes from a western environment
where she experiences herself not primarily as a member of a
community to which she has responsibilities and which gives her
an identity and place in return, but as a free-floating
individual who has to constantly work to "find" herself. The
self, therefore, becomes the primary medium for spiritual search
and expression.
It is perhaps this that is hardest for many Asians to
understand: focus on the self need not be the same as
selfishness. Melissa Jane's works make clear that she focuses on
herself and her experiences and feelings, not because she only
thinks or cares about herself, but because it is only through
facing up to herself that she feels she has any chance of finding
the divine, of scratching through the surface of life to the
deeper and more enduring truths.
Melissa Jane's paintings do bring forward universal themes
that are relevant to all human beings: love, death,
relationships, affection, fear, illness, beauty and ugliness; the
search for meaning in a universe that can sometimes seem empty of
answers.
In western countries where individuals, not communities, are
the basic social unit, most people don't have a common tradition
that connects them to a larger whole. What people have is a
common humanity and common experiences as human beings.
When looking at work such as Melissa Jane's, this means that
rather than relying on established traditions of symbols and
meanings, we must draw from ourselves -- or allow to be drawn by
Melissa's paintings -- those feelings and experiences that mesh
with what she has visualized on canvas for us.
For some, this may be work they don't want to do. Some
(including Australians and other westerners) may find the kind of
personal self-exposure in Melissa's canvases embarrassing and
shocking and be unable to surpass those feelings to connect with
the work. Some people may only look to art to provide something
pretty and soothing for their tired eyes, or perhaps to record
and immortalize a loved one or treasured object or place.
But such art, while it has its place, doesn't take art, or us,
to the limits. Art has the power to do much more than merely
represent or recreate the beautiful. For those who live within
social and spiritual traditions that still absorb and nourish the
individual, like those in Bali and in many Moslem areas of
Indonesia, perhaps the need for art that does more than represent
the beautiful or make signs of the faith (such as the
calligraphic paintings that have become so popular here in the
past 20 years) is not felt in a significant way.
For those who come from more individualized backgrounds and
are no longer grounded in nourishing geographical and/or
spiritual communities, art can become one of the essential
vehicles for spiritual exploration and discovery in an often
disturbingly fragmented and confusing world.
The paintings of Melissa Jane, on display at the Australian
Embassy until the end of July, give a concrete and moving
expression of that concept, one of the driving forces behind the
development of modern art in the western world.