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.