Van der Sterren paints landscape from memory
Van der Sterren paints landscape from memory
By Benito Lopulalan
DENPASAR (JP): Mooi Indie, or "Beautiful Indonesia", a school of painting that explores the beauty of Indonesia, used to be accused of not caring about the problems of the country's poor people. The Association of Indonesian Painters (Persagi) protested against the school on that ground in 1938. The association's members, such as Soedjojono, Emiria Soenassa, Affandi, Otto Djaja and Agoes Djaja blew the trumpet of expressionism, impressionism and surrealism as new and more dynamic ways of portraying life through art.
John van der Sterren may be an artist on the boundary between Mooi-Indie and the followers of Persagi. His paintings draw on expressionism, a school through which some members of Persagi once expressed their freedom to reject Mooi-Indie's line. However, as far as theme is the concerned, his paintings, which refer to Bali and Priangan (West Java), are not greatly different from those of the Dutch-educated painters: they represent culture embedded in places, not in people.
The course of his own life may explain his preferences, both in style and subject matter. A New Zealander, the artist was born in Sukabumi, West Java, in 1938. Both his grandparents had come from the Netherlands to settle in Java at the turn of the century and his parents, too, were born here. The fact that van der Sterren spent his childhood on a tea estate above the town of Sukabumi explains his taste for landscapes.
Everything came to an end with World War II. Van der Sterren was interned in a Japanese camp in Ambarawa, Central Java, the tea fields were destroyed and replaced by a clove plantation.
Referring as they do to his experience in the Sukabumi landscape of his childhood, landscapes are presumably more to van der Sterren than just places with buildings and trees. His landscapes are reminiscences of childhood, a kind of psychological regression of the artist, in which all recent psychological and material demands are channeled into the memory of childhood's safety: under the secure wings of powerful parents. As a Dutchman on a plantation at that time, the artist's parents' position was socially powerful: in pre-World War II Java a plantation manager was a tuan, more like a small king whose plantation was his small kingdom.
Obviously, the high social level had psychological advantages. However, to some extent, it also created distance from the surrounding people. Distance can be seen in the themes of Van der Sterren's paintings. Mountains, temples: all the landscapes are of places with trees but no people.
After the war van der Sterren and his parents went to New Zealand and settled in Wellington, where the young boy found that his interests always centered around the arts and he received encouragement from the famous New Zealand artist Cendric Zavage. He became a member of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts and traveled to many countries, painting landscapes.
In 1983 Van der Sterren came to work in Indonesia and settled in Jakarta, then in West Java, where he continues to paint landscapes and portraits in his studio in Subang. After two major exhibitions in Jakarta (Duta Fine Arts Foundation) and Bandung (Museum Barli) he has achieved strong recognition from collectors.
The artist went to Bali during 1994 and was amazed by its beauty. His recent exhibition at the Nyoman Gunarsa Museum in Klungkung, Bali, colorfully expressed that amazement. The paintings still contain his reminiscences of childhood and the sense of distance.