ART AND THE ARTIST

THE PLASTIC ARTS IN MODERN BALI

Highly specialized branches of the graphic art are the illustrations of palm-leaf manuscripts (lontar) , and the making of leather puppets for shadow-plays (wayang kulit) . In Singaradja there is a library of these manuscripts, the Kirtya Liefrinck van der Tuuk, where are preserved some splendid old lontars with illustrations (or copies of them) such as the famous Dampati Lelangon, taken from the palace of the Radjas of Lombok at the time of the war; the Tetumbalans of Kamenuh and Sawan, the Bhima Swarga, Pari Bhasa, Adi Parwa, and so forth. These are masterpieces of the art of illustration, with miniature pictures incised with an iron style on the blades of the lontar palm, the scratch filled in with a mixture of soot and oil.

These manuscripts are in the form of books. The lontar leaves are cut evenly into strips an inch wide and from a few inches to two feet in length. They are preserved between two boards of some precious wood cut to the size of the leaves and bound together by a cord that passes through a hole in the centre of each leaf.

The shadow puppets, the wayang kulit (described later in greater detail) , are fashioned from buffalo parchment, cut out with special iron dyes into the most delicate lace and painted. The style of the wayang is highly conventionalized although it is considerably more realistic than its ancestor, the Javanese wayang.

It is curious that the art of painting pictures is not altogether dependent on the wayang forms, as it happens to be in Java, where the whole of the art consists in reproductions of stylized wayangs; their outline is always in profile, while in Balinese paintings a face in profile is never found. However, the influence of these forms in the aesthetic education of children was patent when Jane Belo distributed paper and water-colours among the children of the small village of Sayan, to see what children without artistic training would do; the majority turned out pictures that were arrangements of elementary interpretations of wayang shapes.

Together with sculpture, painting underwent a liberating revolution after boys from around Ubud started to paint pictures in a " new " style. These were curious scenes from daily life on backgrounds of Balinese landscapes and village scenes, a mixture of realism and of the formal stylistic, with naive figures of ordinary Balinese: a woman feeding chickens, men working in the fields, a cremation, and a dance performance, subjects that were never attempted before by Balinese painters.

This developed rapidly into a more mature, naturalistic style, producing a new crop of fine artists, each with a definite individual mark, such as I Sobrat, Made Griya, and Gusti Nyoman from Ubud, Ida Bagus Anom from Mas, and the group of young painters from Batuan who draw fantastic forests and strange figures in half-tone against solid black backgrounds. These artists were encouraged by Spies and the Dutch painter Bonnet, who bought their pictures and provided them with materials; being careful, however, to keep undesirable influences from them, and helping them to sell their work in the museum of Den Pasar, a clearing-house where only pictures of high quality are exhibited.

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