Will the real Andrew Wellman please step forward?

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