Pemecutan, inventor of 'fingertip paintings'

By Alpha Savitri

KUTA, Bali (JP): Early 1967. Something happened that exasperated Ngurah Gede Pemecutan. Later, this exasperation became a point of departure from his career as an artist in the country's fine arts arena. He is now widely known as the inventor of a painting technique using fingertips.

It so happened that someone claiming to be a painter often visited Ngurah Gede Pemecutan's studio in Kuta. He always arrived with sketches and paintings that he claimed to be his own work.

The host was curious whether the guest was actually a painter or an impostor. To satisfy his curiosity, he asked the guest to paint a picture of Pura (temple) Prajapati at Kuta Beach. His hunch was right. The visitor was no painter at all.

Knowing this, Pemecutan suddenly wanted to demonstrate his painting ability before his guest. Unfortunately, he had already lost control over his emotion, and also his concentration. It is easy to guess that his painting was not as good as expected.

Then, he put down the brush. Deeply exasperated, he stirred the paint on the pallet with the fingers of his right hand. Then he let the paint-covered fingers touch and move over the canvas, where he had painted the picture of Tari Baris (Baris dance), which he thought was a failure.

Later, sitting down, he happened to observe this painting from a distance. "I was surprised. The touch of the fingers, found all over the canvas, generated a very good impact and effect of colors," he reminisced.

This observation prompted him to finish the painting with the technique of using fingertips. The result? A very satisfactory and inspiring painting of Tari Baris.

This painting later inspired him to paint with his fingertips and rarely use a brush. After experimenting he finally found a painting technique using fingertips. Pemecutan, who hails from a noble family in Pura Pemecutan, Denpasar, called his paintings "Paintings of the Fingertips".

When observing his paintings, you will find yourself in a universe with various heavenly objects in abundance. Then an actual shape slowly emerges from the colorful dots spread all over the canvas. Right before your eyes, a painting unfolds as a three-dimensional picture.

At a glance, people might think that these dots are made after the painting is completed. Brushes are absolutely discarded and are used only when the painter provides a color base to the canvas.

Pemecutan always colors the canvas first. "Otherwise, the white canvas will always stand out. The colorful dots cannot cover all the area, can they?"

After the right color has been applied to the canvas, make sure that the paint is really dry. Then use a piece of chalk to draw a sketch of your object; the paint-dipped tip of the middle finger can follow the lines of this sketch.

When the paint is dry, the chalk sketch will be covered. Only the dots remain. This sketch can then be given some color. Dark and bright colors, applied side by side, will give a concave or convex impression as well as the image of far and near and bright or dark.

Apart from using contrasting colors, the painter can also use pressure. If a finger is pressed hard, there will be deep dark dots. If the pressure is light, the color will be light.

It is very obvious that sensitivity of feeling must be present if one wishes to paint a good picture. The dots must be placed correctly with one touch. The fingertip technique is quite different from the use of a brush.

A brush will allow correction of a mistake. In the case of fingertips, repetition will only make the painting dirty. "It must be borne in mind that when one color must be covered with another, the paint must first be really dry," said Pemecutan, a father of two.

It is easy to imagine that a painting made with this technique take months, or even over a year, to complete. His latest work, Puput Badung (three meters by 1.5 meters), took 20 months to complete. This painting is an imaginative prelude of how a war broke out between troops of Badung kingdom and Dutch soldiers.

Pemecutan has, since inventing the fingertip technique, been consistently using the fingertips of his right hand. From 1967 to today, he has finished over 500 paintings.

Each of his works carries the date of when it was completed, placed in one of the four corners of the canvas. Unlike ordinary paintings, which are easily forged, the fingertip technique seems to be forgery-proof.

Some 200 of his best paintings are displayed at his Fingerprint Museum, Jl. Hayam Wuruk 175, Denpasar.

Pemecutan, born on July 4, 1936, said he did not hold special promotions for his paintings. Most collectors of his paintings are foreigners. "Foreigners like unique things. Most domestic collectors are attracted only by painters at the peak of their popularity. They have even bought paintings for investment," he noted.

Born into a noble family of Puri Pemecutan, Denpasar, Pemecutan completed his secondary studies in 1959. "I learned to paint in my childhood but did not seriously engage myself in painting until I had left senior high school. I failed the entrance test for the School of Veterinary Medicine so devoted myself to fine art," he reminisced.

Until 1963, Pemecutan used Chinese ink to paint his shadow puppetry and traditional objects in black and white. Between 1963 and 1967, he began to adopt a modern painting technique and painted on canvas, using oils.

His first choice was naturalism, followed by a period of impressionism and then his own fingertip technique.

Pemecutan was awarded a Kerti Budaya certificate and a gold medal from Badung regional administration in recognition of his great merits in the fine art world. Four years later he received a Dharma Kusuma Madia certificate and a silver medal from Bali's governor.

In 1987 he received another certificate. This time from the head of Werdi Budaya Cultural Park in Denpasar, Bali.