ART AND THE ARTIST

THE PLASTIC ARTS IN MODERN BALI

The carving technique consists in chipping bits of wood gradually with the highly sharpened instruments, not by hand pressure, as among us, but with light taps of the mallet, obtaining in this manner delicacy of touch and greater control over the material. If the statue is not to be painted or gilded, it is made smooth with pumice and given a high polish by rubbing it with bamboo.

Painting: Unlike the arts of the theatre, music, and sculpture, painting was little in evidence as a living art on our first visit to Bali. Outside of painting artifacts of daily use and scant decorations for temples, the Balinese made only paintings of two sorts: ider-ider, strips of hand-made cotton a foot wide by some fifteen or twenty feet long, hung at festivals under the roofs, all around the pavilions in houses and temples; and langse, wide pieces of painted cloth used as hangings or curtains.

There were often calendars (pelelintangan) used to establish the horoscopes of children, divided into squares with symbolical designs, one for each of the thirty-five days of the month. Often the paintings represented scenes of mythology, episodes and battles from the literary epics; but there were seldom scenes from daily life and never of contemporary subjects. The characters shown were invariably gods, devils, princes, and princesses with their retainers, dressed in the ancient costumes of Hindu-Javanese times.

Their attitudes were stilted and the subjects standardized, but at times the restricted artist found an episode where he could give vent to his erotic sense of humour and he took good advantage of a love scene or a mishap to one of the retainers of the heroes. Erotic paintings were met with at times, scenes of fantastic attitudes in love-making, which they assured me would prevent the house where they were kept from burning!

Only the old paintings showed skill and taste; the modern ones sold at the lobby of the Bali Hotel were coarse, hastily made, and with a sad poverty of subject-matter. Painting was at a standstill, no longer in demand from the Balinese themselves and suffering from lack of freedom of expression. Only rarely did we find pictures with style, but the reason for this was the systematic and mechanical manner in which they were made; a master painter drew the main outlines and gave the final touches, leaving his children and apprentices to fill in the colours.

Once in Gelgel, centre of painters of the conventional style, the two children of a painter had a heated argument because one had painted with blue the flesh parts of a figure and insisted he was right.

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