Painter Sonny Eska reflects on his world
Mehru Jaffer, Contributor, Jakarta
His father is a Christian from Sumatra; his Muslim mother, half Bugis and half Javanese.
But it is the ancient Hindu philosophy that inspires the highly imaginative art work of Sonny Eska the most.
Different cultural influences enrich his life to this day -- despite the fact that the 47-year-old artist will not soon be on any lists of naming the wealthiest men in the world.
"Every time my children ask me if I am rich I say to them, very ... then they want me to show them my money, and I point to all my paintings," smiled Sonny, adding that he is often nagged by his children for not being able to buy a fancy car for the family.
His parents had expected Sonny to take up architecture as a profession. But, determined to paint, Sonny defied parental orders, and picked up his brush and canvas soon after graduating high school.
As a 19-year-old, he gave up all formal education and followed the path of the flower-power generation and the hippy caravan of the world to the sun-drenched beaches of Goa, India.
There, he made on-the-spot sketches and sold them to finance his wanderings around the globe.
One day he walked into a room where an Indian philosopher was giving a talk.
He remembers little else from that occasion except the definition of Shakti (cosmic power) as being a combination of creative intelligence and beauty. He has kept that in mind ever since. From the Indian book of the Bhagavad Gita or the Song of the Gods, he has learned never to waver from one's duty.
He is convinced that his only calling in life is to paint, and thus throws himself into his work -- even though his mother still disapproves. "It's difficult for her to accept the fact that I am not an architect," Sonny said.
What disturbs Sonny is that more and more people are scrambling for the most obvious things -- whether power or money. "It makes me sick," he said, to think that human beings are even prepared to destroy each other in the name of power and control.
He insisted that this is not what religion expects of believers as he discussed the conflicts taking place in different parts of Indonesia with a pained expression.
The tall man with an extremely wiry frame said he felt dwarfed at the way all of life's mysteries and the concept of God has led to such profanity and violence today.
Like all modernists, Sonny's art does not exult man alone, but rather depicts existence as a fabric in which people, events and things are intimately interrelated as a unified whole.
His role as a painter is not to make a realistic record like a photographer, but to awaken his own perceptions.
When he expresses his concern for things like the rape of the country's women or rich forestation and the ruining of the seas, there are no obvious drawings of women, trees or fish, but rather colors and shapes that speak to a language not heard before.
Sonny's paintings do not copy a particular event or scene. They emanate a kind of spirit and momentum that forces the viewer to look at the world through the eyes of the artist.
What is most striking in his work is the use of white paint. Like the cosmos, Sonny's canvas seems to first receive the colors of red, yellow, green, blue, violet, indigo and orange in the unified form of white before radiating it back into the world in all its variegated hues.
Standing before Sonny's art, it is possible to sense that space is not static, that there is much more giving and taking going on. In his latest work, done mostly in 2001, the primary colors seem to crawl all over the canvas, creating a formless effect that is rather mesmerizing.
Sonny doesn't use color only to make the grass green, or the roses red, but also to imagine aspects of life that are beyond description.
There is the trilogy where the colors used in each of the three paintings are similar to the process of improvisation in music when the very spirit of the art work seems to surface towards the climax to acquire a life of its own.
Post-reformation Indonesia is painted by Sonny as a black background with a yellow and black eye on a white square with a torn top and a jagged bottom. The tears are blobs of black brush strokes that run down the white from the yellow into a sea of blue. In between are puddles of red and shades of a different kind of yellow.
He was inspired to paint Scene of a Night Dream after one of his friends was brutally injured during a street demonstration against the regime in the mid 1990's.
Sonny was shocked at the police report that said his friend limped because of polio, and not because of the blows of the police batons that had rained so hard on him.
He said he is happy that the country is now free, but feels that it has not changed for the better.
He describes the Indonesia of today as if it is a state between dream and reality.
And to be able to enjoy Sonny's world, trapped in the throes of a twilight zone, it is best to do so without comparing it to one's own world.
Reflection of Life, an exhibition of paintings by Sonny Eska remains open at The Lobby, Regent hotel, Jl. H.R. Rasuna Said Kav. B-4, South Jakarta, till Feb. 13.