Sherratt's artistic journey to contentment
By Mehru Jaffer
JAKARTA (JP): Bruce Sherratt seems to be finally at peace with himself. After roaming several continents, the 56-year-old son of an English coal miner is happy to be in Jakarta.
Sitting with chest bared in the center of his studio that is partly meshed rather than walled all the way up to the roof, Sherratt seldom allows himself to lose sight of the greenery outside. Here yellow and orange colored birds chirp behind; in an adjoining room his 13-year-old daughter Millicent is on the computer. With a Buddhist shrine beside him, all seems to be well with the world of this surrealist painter. At least for the moment.
A teacher of visual arts at the Jakarta International School, Sherratt arrived in Jakarta seven years ago from Munich, Germany, bringing with him paintings in dark, damp and moldy looking colors that remind one of secret corners inside a church.
Once here, he found the first opportunity to rush to Bali where he watched the mysterious island explode the creativity within him in the same way as Sri Lanka had done. The result was The Awakening, a 143 cm by 184 cm canvas cluttered with provocative images both fantastic and grotesque and colors so bright they blind. During this time he also created the breathtakingly beautiful Bali Dawn trilogy. That was in 1997.
In his latest work, Violet, Green, Red, that is as large as The Awakening, the clutter has been reduced and the colors used are more harmonious. He seems to be still saying the same thing but in a more simple, wiser way, making one believe that soon it might be very well possible for him to state it all with just a line and a dot.
"To me Bali is exactly like Columbo but without the war in Sri Lanka," Sherratt told The Jakarta Post just before Synthesis and Abstraction, an exhibition of his latest works opened here. In 1991, Sherratt lived in Columbo and the stay helped him to start to paint once again with an energy that enthralled him.
As a little boy Sherratt remembers being fascinated with the rugged peaks and valleys of Staffordshire and Derbyshire where he grew up, but he says that even at that early stage in his life he found the surroundings so dreary and knew about that quite another world existed beyond.
But it was not until he was 22 that he was able to earn enough money laboring at a construction site and teaching to travel to Mexico and San Francisco.
It was the 1960s. He recalls how heady those days were when he felt just ripe enough to be able to enjoy all the unpredictability of life without a care in the world. A lot of reading led him to the theory of colors of the 18th century intellectual giant Rudolf Steiner. He read Freud and Jung among countless other thinkers, and got himself a degree in art education from Cardiff, Wales. But he could not imagine spending the rest of his life in England. He hankered for the tropics and a little more warmth. He wanted to be inspired again as a painter as well as a human being.
Besides, his confidence was a little shaky. He had saturated himself with theoretical knowledge about art but as a painter he remained parched. The degree in art education helped him to get a job as a teacher in an international school in Tanzania, East Africa.
He had spent time in Mexico hypnotized by the Aztec, Mayan and Toltec mythology, and the rich folk culture of Africa was to further feed his starving fantasies. Then he moved to the Philippines, Sri Lanka and in Bali found himself influenced by the traditional Batuan style under the spell of which numerous painters of dream pictures flourish. From reading Jung, Sherratt realized that the unconscious has important messages for the conscious mind with the former communicating it through images and symbols, while the latter communicates through language.
Sherratt found surrealism best suited to his desire to explore personal fantasies, both conscious and unconscious as a way toward reaching an equilibrium in life. Surrealism started as a movement in art and literature in Europe between the two world wars as a reaction against the destruction wrought by rationalism that its members felt had guided Europe's culture and politics, culminating in the horrors of World War One.
Surrealists want to see the realms of consciousness and unconsciousness united so completely that the world of dream and fantasy is joined to the everyday, rational world into one absolute reality. Freud and Jung gave fresh food for thought by mapping the threefold constitution for human beings of the spiritual, the psychic and the material. Ancient mythology and symbolism were used as lessons to understand the contents of the psyche through reason.
Sherratt's art is also an attempt to link the inner realities of his own subconscious with the conscious, eventually to liberate the mind of all contradictions. Apart from his love of painting Sherratt needs the exercise especially since he feels that there are so many messages lying buried deep in his personal psyche. He finds that surrealism allows him accessibility to the untapped world of his own unconsciousness when he is able to dive deep down inside to fish out all the demons instead of pretending they are not there.
Following more in the footsteps of Joan Miro, the Spanish artist who was born at the turn of the last century, the many inscapes of Sherratt are loaded with playful but often demonic expressions. He seems least afraid to mirror in his art both the horrors as well as all that is beautiful in life. The result is that some titles like Victim, inspired by the riots here in May, and the eyes of a child hollow with terror and blanketed in the color red in East Timor haunt the viewer.
Apart from attempting to find that fine balance between life's contradictions and the dynamics of the politics of all opposites, what is also an obsession with Sherratt is the enigmatic relationship between male and female. The forms appear all the time in most of his work.
"Whether it is within an individual or between two people, all life revolves around the male and female, doesn't?" questions Sherratt, who spends much of his time trying to bridge the gap between all opposites and all contradictions. After all, he does trace some of the anguish he has faced in life to the baffling relationship with his mother, a relationship that has taken him more than half a century to come to terms with.
Synthesis and Abstractions opens at the Regent hotel on March 3. Further inquiries at 2523456.