Ubud inspires Mary Northmore's female artists

By Sarah Murray

UBUD, Bali (JP): "Welcome to Ubud, the global village."

No one actually says this to you as you make your way into Ubud, a village nestled in the mountains of south central Bali and long known as the cultural center of the area. As you pass through the cement gapura which flanks the main road and marks your official entry into desa adat Ubud, (the traditional village of Ubud) you are more likely to get calls of "Transport? Transport?" from the ever-hopeful young men who line the streets standing next to their parked vans. Or perhaps, "Would you like to look my painting?" from a smiling villager patiently plying the streets in search of buyers. But "a global village" may be the phrase that best sums up Ubud, a small rice farming village that has had a magnetic attraction for foreigners for over half a century. More than a few come for a brief visit only to stay for a lifetime.

Count Englishwoman Mary Northmore, head of Seniwati Gallery for Women, among their number. A former English language teacher who for years plied her trade to travel the globe in search of new experiences, she finally found a home, a husband, and a new passion in Ubud.

The most famous of Ubud emigres are, of course, the artists Walter Spies and Rudolf Bonnet, who sought refuge from persecution as homosexuals and from a Europe that seemed shattered and spiritually empty after the degradations of World War I. Spies and Bonnet continued to paint in Ubud and taught young men in the area drawing, anatomy and perspective, infusing elements of the western visual tradition into the already rich Ubud-area visual traditions sustained in temple sculpture and painting, costume for dance and temple offerings. The paintings of their Balinese friends sold well to tourists, already a staple of Ubud life, and so many others took up the craft, creating an extensive network of skilled painters throughout the Ubud area. These paintings also visualized the myth of paradise Bali, contributing to the development of Ubud's attraction for western wanderers.

Many other western artists, drawn by the stories of Spies and Bonnet and the art coming from the island, came to be inspired, to learn, and perhaps to teach. Le Mayeur and Covarrubias, Arie Smit and Donald Friend all contributed to the rich traditions of modern painting and sculpture that have continued to develop to the present day and make Ubud a world center of visual art.

Northmore knew none of Ubud's thick and rich history when she first rolled into Ubud in 1980. If she had, she likely would have never ventured to start the Seniwati Gallery for Women, a small gallery that is already having a big impact on women artists living in Bali.

She came as a skeptic, a long-time world traveler who had purposely avoided Bali because of horror stories she had heard about Kuta. She came for just a few days, pushed by a fellow English teacher in Hong Kong.

Once here, she made the usual tourist pilgrimage to the Neka Museum. She didn't learn much about Ubud painting traditions, but she did fall in love with a romantic painting by Abdul Aziz, Saling Tertarik (Mutual Attraction), showing a young man leaning out of his canvas to admire a young woman in another. She didn't stop there, but in the kind of "life following art" occurrence that so often happens in Bali, fell in love with the artist as well, who, although Javanese, has long lived in Bali. They married and she moved to Ubud, for good.

After her marriage, Northmore didn't have to work, as Aziz was happy to support her. But being the go-getter that she is, Northmore wasn't long satisfied with a larger outlet for her energies. She was tired of teaching English; she had been doing that for more than 20 years and felt ready to move in a new direction. She decided to start exploring her own creative side and began making quilts, something she had never had time to do.

The quilts led Northmore to want to talk with other artists, particularly other women artists, about the challenges she was facing. She started talking with other women artists, both expatriates and Balinese, and found a lot of other artists were interested in meeting like-minded souls. Judith Shelley, an Australian artist married at the time to artist Made Kertanegoro, suggested they form a group where women artists could get together and discuss their work.

From that simple idea sprang the Association of Women Artists in Bali (Ikatan Seniwati di Bali, or Iswali), which held its first meeting on the floor of Northmore's living room. Nine artists came to that first meeting; and then fifteen to the next, and, in leaps and bounds, the organization grew.

While Northmore was happy with the group, she and others began to realize that what was really needed was a gallery to man the women's work visible and allow it to be sold in an honest way that funneled a fair price to the artist. With Northmore's many years of experience as a teacher, administrator and organizer, it seemed natural that she should take up the task. She had never run a gallery before and didn't know much about marketing art, but what was more important was that she cared passionately about helping support women artists in Indonesia, particularly Balinese artists.

So began Seniwati Gallery, which now represents forty-two Indonesian artists, seven from outside of Bali, and supports eight full-time staff. The gallery is located in what was formerly Abdul Aziz's house in central Ubud, a charming hand- built house with five small rooms that don't feel cramped because of the skylights and windows that let in a generous amount of light.

No one, including Northmore, would ever have guessed how quickly Seniwati would develop into a major presence in Ubud. In five years, Seniwati has grown and added a workshop and gallery space down the road, a gift and handicraft shop near the Ubud market and rental studio spaces for women artists. The workshop offers art classes for both children and adults, and serves as a gallery space for special solo exhibitions.

Every bit of wall space is taken up with paintings, which range widely in style and accomplishment. Some are in traditional Ubud-area styles, such as the Pengosekan decorative birds and flowers of Gusti Ayu Suartini and the beautiful Spies-like Ubud landscapes of Gusti Agung Galuh.

Gusti Ayu Natiharimini creates contemporary paintings in the Batuan style with a sensual gusto that brings freshness and life to a genre that in general suffers from too much copying and repetition. She paints both larger, simultaneous narrative works, such as Wedding Celebration, which shows the bustling village activities during a traditional wedding ceremony, and smaller pieces that usually focus on female characters from local fairy tales or from her own imagination. Her paintings glow with color.

Others, like Balinese artist Cok Mas Astiti and Sumatran artist Yanuar Ernawati, draw entirely on contemporary Indonesian academic traditions. Cok Mas Astiti's work portrays a Balinese woman's life from the inside with humor and feeling. Favorite themes are mother and child, and the play of the eyes between white female tourists, with their cameras and curious gazes, and the Balinese women who are being gazed at. Yanuar's work is among the strongest at Seniwati. Bold, abstracted figures, bright colors, and a wide range of fresh themes are typical of her work.

The prices of the gallery are a high compared to the local tourist market prices, but low compared with prices of Jakarta or Yogyakarta exhibitions and modern art galleries. Works sold through the gallery are priced to include a 30 percent commission, which also helps cover some of the costs of the sanggar, Iswali, and other Seniwati activities.

That Seniwati has indeed arrived is indicated by its most recent exhibition. It ran for over a month until mid-April in Ubud's Puri Lukisan Museum, the home the Walter Spies collection. Seniwati managed to fill the large open room, and its exhibition drew a steady stream of both visitors and sales. On my second visit, in fact, there was a hurried conference going on about how to fill a blank caused by the sale of a work to someone who couldn't wait for the exhibition to finish before taking the painting home.

In fitting with Puri Lukisan's role as preserver of "traditional" Balinese painting (which dates from the 1930s), the show hung only works by Balinese artists or non-Balinese artists who paint explicitly Balinese scenes and themes. This means that some of Seniwati's best artists, such as Yanuar Ernawati, were not represented. The show was still strong. The technical quality of the work was high, although, as is generally true in contemporary Balinese painting, some of it is derivative and without any creative tang.

The most exciting presence at the exhibition was a young artist new to Seniwati, Desak Murni, whose paintings are fresh and unusual in their playfulness, erotic quality, and imagery. Murni studies under the painter Mokoh, a known painter of erotica and other paintings in the Pengosekan style. His influence shows both in Murni's palette, which runs to the soft pastels of tan, yellow and green rarely seen in Balinese work, and her attraction to erotic themes. Her work is less explicit and softer than her teachers, designed not to arouse the viewer but to represent a woman's sensual experiences; much like taking an Antonio Blanco and turning it inside out.

Her titles are also humorous and playful. Domestic Interaction, for example, shows a bare-breasted woman standing with upraised arms behind a bamboo-barred window. Her face is visible only to her nose. Outside, at the brick wall, is a lecherous, large-lipped profile of a man. A string of opaque tan bubbles stream from his mouth, which lead the viewer's eye to a quarter-moon shape pierced by an arrow, with a hairy, penile- shape projecting, its tip not quite touching the bottom bamboo bar of the window. The woman's face shows surrender, but her lips are parted as if she were breathing heavily in anticipation.

For women

Many Indonesians smile at the idea of a gallery especially for women artists and suggest that it isn't perhaps truly necessary here. However, Seniwati has struggled from its inception against the strong stereotype of women artists as casual hobbyist painters without serious talent or devotion to their craft. It is a sign of just how much professional talent there is in the Ubud area that Northmore's open-door policy of representing any woman who comes to Seniwati has not held Seniwati back in establishing itself as a serious gallery.

However, there are many in the Ubud art world, including some members of Seniwati itself, who feel that the gallery is not well served by this open-door policy and wish a more usual professional exclusivity and elitism were adopted. These critics do not understand how strongly Northmore has been influenced by egalitarian ideals she absorbed as a student activist in the 1970s. For Northmore, the point of Seniwati is not to become just another gallery, but to be a place that supports the professional artistic aspirations of all women.

This egalitarian philosophy is a new one for the Balinese art scene, where the egalitarianism of galleries until now has only been an egalitarianism of the market. Northmore, however, continues to represent a number of painters who have not yet sold a single work.

There are others who, on the other hand, object to Seniwati's policy of representing only women artists and feel this is elitist and restrictive. They don't understand why women need a gallery of their own. Perhaps this is only a natural response to the rapid success Seniwati has experienced, in a time when the overall art-market in Ubud is in a slump. In general, however, Seniwati has been strongly supported by both the men and women of the community.

Northmore has been good at keeping these issues low profile and focusing instead on building up the business of the gallery and encouraging the artists to take more control of their careers. She has also shown herself to be a champion advocate and networker for the artists and has steadily been developing international connections so the artists have opportunities to travel and exhibit abroad.

Until now, buyers have largely been women from the United States, England, Switzerland and other western countries, with a smaller but strong group of supporters in Jakarta. This suggests that the much debated and misunderstood feminism of the West, generally rejected as a political ideology in Indonesia, is having an important impact on the fate of women artists in Bali. Western women influenced by feminism feel a kinship with other women of the world arrive as tourists and are eager to support the work of local women.

As is so often true, success and growth bring their own problems. All of the buildings currently used for Seniwati activities are rented with leases soon to expire. Northmore is seeking donors to support the building of a unified center for women's art, where the now dispersed activities can be unified under one roof and the women artists of Bali can find a permanent home. Anyone who has met Northmore cannot doubt she will succeed. A bustling dynamo of energy and conversation, ever eager to connect someone else or see just one more artist's photos, she and the unique gallery she has created are a distinctive and distinguished addition to Ubud's long history of art.

There is a good chance that Jakartans will soon be able to see Seniwati's accomplishments for themselves, as Seniwati is negotiating to have a major show in Jakarta in a few months.

From a small gathering of women in Northmore's living room to the attention of an international audience in Jakarta is indeed a long way to come in six years.