Will the real Andrew Wellman please step forward?
Johnny Landung, Contributor/Bali
When I arrive to interview Andrew Wellman about his upcoming exhibition at Biasa Gallery, Bali, he's not there. But stuck on the bamboo gate is a hastily scribbled note saying: "Johnny, I'll be back at 6:30 2 be asked questions".
I can't help but smile -- most would send a text message, but this old-world approach is typical of Andrew, a little gesture that recalls a pre-cell phone era when handwritten notes were a staple means of communication.
Plus I'm pretty sure he's gone surfing.
Wellman paints the things he likes. Being a member of that school of painting known as Pop Art, he's also quite happy to reproduce them. Original reissues you might say.
Take his Buddha heads -- they began life as an image on a postcard which he then manipulated on his computer. Now an entire wall of his open-plan bungalow is covered with them -- 35x50 silk-screen prints of the serenely smiling icon in bold, often primary colors.
But look closer and you notice that these are no ordinary canvases -- you can see background images, usually centered in the Buddha's capacious forehead, as though he were contemplating chickens, rabbits and vintage cars; antelopes and Karim Abdul Jabbar (the lanky guy who gave Bruce Lee such a hard time).
It began with Wellman noticing the often peculiar designs on rice sacking, provoking a flurry of such paintings, then diversifying with cheap T-shirts and textiles with retro designs which he chanced upon at a market in Denpasar.
The exhibition at Biasa Gallery, the leading art space in Seminyak, which opened on Dec. 22, is all about girls and surfing, both of which the artist likes.
As he puts it, "my paintings are like a reminder of what's important in my life. I wake up and see an abstract of a guy surfing hanging above my bed and I smile and head down to the beach with my long board".
The image in question is called It's A Beautiful Day and it provides the title of the Biasa exhibition. It's an impressionistic oil painting in blue, white and black (200 x 200) countless speckles of color forming a huge collage of ocean spray framing a stately surfer in silhouette. It's exhilarating and naive and it does indeed make you smile.
"Look at my art and you'll know that Andrew likes big old classic cars, surfing, Pernod, Vespas, The Beach Boys, Nag Champa incense, Stella (the jet black Great Dane he lives with)... it's all like a visual diary really." Art as lifestyle, lifestyle as art.
Seven years ago, his lifestyle was very different. He was managing a warehouse for Hewlett Packard back in Australia, other people's paintings hung on his walls and he didn't smile so much.
But in 1998, he escaped to Bali and by chance or fate or karma came under the tutelage of American artist Symon, proprietor (or rather progenitor) of Ubud's Art Zoo.
"It's really what any aspiring artist dreams off stumbling across... like an apprenticeship. I had to learn the rudiments so I spent a lot of time washing brushes, stretching canvases and stuff like that. Symon always used to say you can't lose by trying and the more I tried, the more I realized this is what I wanted to do."
The first pieces that he was really proud of included a surf painting F*#k The Duck, I Got The Wave ("a little girl came into the studio one day and said I should put a rubber duck in the painting. So I did"), and another called The Red Flotilla, depicting a fleet of vintage Vans sneakers in a sea of ultramarine.
But it was the Buddha heads that gained Andrew his growing reputation. What he's done for the Biasa exhibition is to bridge the perceptual gap between these and his surf paintings, with a big wave made up of a collage of Buddhas called Good Vibrations.
"I guess that's one of my trademarks. I'll do one big painting made up of smaller canvases so that you can play with it like a jigsaw puzzle. If you get bored of looking at a face I've painted, just shuffle the squares around and you've created an abstract.
"One I particularly like is of a Buddhist monk holding an umbrella -- it's made up of 30 canvases so you can make him appear hung over, or have his head floating surreally in the sky."
All of this reflects Wellman's desire to produce art that everyone can enjoy. Why do one Buddha head for one person when you can make a thousand people happy? This is art treading that fine Warholian line between the original and the mass produced. And that's as deep as I'm going to get, since Wellman has an aversion to mumbo jumbo and gobbledygook, though he is fond of Warhol.
"what I'm doing for this exhibition is producing a series of mini canvases -- re-productions of the original works, yet each an original silk screen in its own rights. It means that even if you can't afford a full size canvas, you can go away with something smaller but equally as beautiful."
Where so much art appears to be deliberately abstruse and elitist, Wellman is making his accessible, interactive and fun. Buy a couple of his paintings and the uniformity of canvas sizes lets you take elements from one painting and clandestinely insert them into the other. Then you can see if dinner guests notice or not.
Happily installed in his rice field idyll in the coastal village of Canggu, he can be seen zipping about on one of his two Vespas, Rosie and Violetta (one named after an ex-girlfriend, the other Penelope Cruz's character in the movie Belle Epoque).
This is his first major solo exhibition in Bali, though he's exhibited in Singapore, had commissions from swanky restaurants and hotels and his paintings hang everywhere from New York lofts to his mum and dad's front room.
When I ask him what his signature is, he tells me "naive, bold, simple. I like my paintings to look like advertisements. I'm advertising the things I like in life, so you're supposed to look at them and smile, that's all. I've called the exhibition It's A Beautiful Day because sometimes we have to remind ourselves that it is."
I-BOX:
The exhibition runs until Jan. 31, 2005 at Biasa Gallery, Jl Raya Seminyak 34, Bali. Tel. 0361 730308 or www.biasabali.com biasa@biasabali.com