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.