Ubud inspires Mary Northmore's female artists

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.