Widayat gives his gift of art to the world

VICTORIA, Canada (JP): Watching and listening to the elders in any society is the privilege of observing history firsthand, before it passes beyond our reach.

This is as true in art as in any other area of life.

The old-timers provide a bridge to the past, where the present has its roots and where contemporary values originated.

This crisis, and while waiting for the economy to return to a better stage so that art collection can resume, is a good time to continue to educate oneself about the longer perspectives in Indonesian art.

The exhibition From 'Beautiful Indies' to Persagi, held at the Fine Arts and Ceramics Museum at Taman Fatahillah in Jakarta from September to December last year, made a significant contribution to the local public's understanding of the first decades of continuous painting development here.

Other upcoming exhibitions will highlight individual and group contributions to the development of modern Indonesian art.

Many of our senior artists have passed onto the pages of history. Others are still treading in well-established footsteps. Only the most exceptional older artists are able to continue to recreate themselves freshly.

One of these is Widayat. Observing him as he begins to round out his eighth decade is like marveling at a rare fruit that offers ever more juice the riper it gets.

Unlike people who begin to shut down, whose sense organs and brain atrophy as they age, Widayat at 78 remains open, alive and curious.

At the same time, he is very much the artist he was three or even five decades ago. Widayat, in art and life, is still fresh and childlike.

Yet wisdom and breadth are also present. This is evident in the painter's oeuvre when studied as a whole. What may look purely decorative and fun expands and deepens when one becomes aware of the variety of themes, subjects, emotions and relationships treated in the large body of his work, every year for nearly half a century.

When Widayat is compared to younger "naive" or "playful" artists who have been given attention in the art world in recent years, the difference between a superficial style and a deeper approach to art and life, masked by playfulness, become evident.

More than 50 works -- all from the latter part of 1996 and the first half of 1997 -- were exhibited at the Bali Padma Hotel last December.

Even this large number does not reflect the full scope of this prolific and hardworking painter's output. For the past year, Widayat has been sketching for and painting on huge canvases measuring 150 cm x 1,450 cm, and more than a dozen canvases with dimension of 225 cm x 250 cm. These will be part of his 80th birthday exhibition scheduled at the National Gallery in Jakarta next year.

On the thematic level, consistency and subtle variation are the qualities that characterize most of Widayat's art. On the stylistic level, complexity, density and iconic stylization characterize his painting.

It is a pleasure to encounter also a completely new kind of work in Widayat's large studio, located behind the Widayat Museum near Magelang. These will be the surprises of the anniversary exhibit.

New themes are added to old ones and new ways of handling paint ensure that Widayat's new paintings are not mere repetitions of earlier ones.

Beginning in 1997, the master became more interested in events illustrated in the news; he has been filling large narrative canvases with complex stories to be deciphered.

Widayat's monumental art is becoming increasingly rooted in history and storytelling about worldly events.

Art observers can expect that also the difficult and challenging events the nation has faced in the last six months will mark the artist's work.

And yet, in other new paintings, we find versions of Widayat's lifelong themes -- fish, birds, horses, women, gatherings of people and trees. These represent the artist's own visual and philosophical vocabulary, expressed in his own language of personal symbols. They bear witness to the smooth continuity of his personality through a life that has seen so much change on the national, social and individual scale.

When I visited for five days in August 1996, I had the chance to observe how Widayat, who now bears the title Haj, spends most of his days almost exclusively devoted to his painting.

Based on recent correspondence with the artist, this is still the case, even though art supplies are now more expensive and the financial return on art less secure.

Like a monk, Widayat starts his day around the crack of dawn and retires long after the sun has set. Being a person devoted to the Islamic religious path, Haj Widayat's day is punctuated by the rituals of cleansing, gentle exercise and prayer.

The rest is work.

Sumini Widayat testifies to how her husband will go on working late into the night if she does not gently pry him away to get some sleep; sometimes Widayat still manages to paint until 1 a.m. or 2 a.m.

A good artist is someone who is so obsessed with his or her work that it is like oxygen, food and sleep; they cannot go long without it.

Beyond this dictum, the variations of how an artist's life and work develops are innumerable. The one thing that is needed is absolute commitment. Once such a commitment is made, chances are that the artist will find their own depths, discover their personal expression and, in so doing, make a name for themselves.

Widayat is a perfect example of this process. But is he, therefore, a recluse who shuns the company of fellow human beings and ignores the events of the world? Not at all.

Widayat is aware of the world, near and far. He keeps in touch through TV, often painting with the TV on, behind his back. He keeps in touch through international and local travel and through his extensive social and personal relationships, smoothly managed by his wife.

If we rise above the current art crisis to look at the larger picture, we see that today's Indonesian art world is ruled, at the superficial level, by several trends.

One is a fad with depicting human suffering, whether due to social, political or personal causes. While modern Indonesian art has been divided since the 1940s between artists who engaged with social realities and artists who concentrated on the personal or spiritual experience, being "socially engaged" has in the last five years become ultrachic.

Without ever having been labeled a political or existential artist, Widayat pioneered such themes early on.

Long before Heri Dono, Dadang Christanto or Entang Wiharso, or the dozens of young artists featured in the 1997 Indonesian Art Awards pursuing themes of suffering, Widayat painted Vietnamese refugees and other nonoptimal states of experience.

At the same time, his work was so broadly defined that he could be placed in a narrow category -- as in his life, his pictorial universe has always shown an unusual balance.

A fuller exploration of this artist's work shows that he, in his quiet way, has pioneered other areas which later became art world fashions as well, such as conceptual art and environmentalist art.

Widayat's art supersedes fashion. He is open to new ideas and influences, but he does not lose himself in the new. In his typical nonelitist and humble way, Widayat has said that he was happy if his work decorated the homes and workplaces of people at home and abroad.

The value of having such people among us, be they artists or others who offer something of themselves to a larger public, is that they show us ways of wisdom amid life's bewildering range of temptations and choices.

If life is a game that, once born into it, we cannot refuse to play, we need teachers to look to who have solved the challenges of personal and professional life successfully. Widayat, one such person, gives the gift of his art to the world.