LITMIR.BIZ

      Fig. 6 Ida Bagus Ketut Siring, Batuan, Unen-unen, Tonya ane Malu, an Embarrassed Spirit, 1937, ink on paper, 24.6 x 21.8 cm, courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, 703-4189.

      Dark, Light and Composition

      For Balinese artists, rendering form is about the use of lines, and the black-and-white basis of painting is important. Artists from different areas refer to this as sigar-mangsi, which literally means ‘to break or tear up the black (ink)’. Two schools, the 1930s Batuan and Sanur painters, took this aspect of Balinese art to extremes in their domination of images with black ink, but figures are arranged on black, whether as lines, ground or elements of form. Gradations of black give depth and placement to figures, not as chiaroscuro or shading from a single light source, but rather as a plastic element in realizing the forms of things and placing them in relation to each other. Western artist Bruce Granquist refers to this as a ‘pulsating’ of light and dark.¹⁷ Nevertheless, some artists taught by Westerners, notably the Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet (1895–1978), took on aspects of chiaroscuro, but in general the use of light on paintings is absolute, not representative of the capturing of a single moment in time. Interestingly, where shading was used by artists from Sanur in the 1930s to add depth, it was often other artists who added this is a finishing touch to the flatter originals¹⁸ (Figs. 6 and 7).

      Composition in Balinese painting is, therefore, about arrangements of items on what we might call a flat ground, like the shadow puppeteers’ arrangement of figures against a screen. In Kamasan art, the artist is imagined as the puppeteer on the other side of the painting to the viewer. In the shadow theatre, the protagonists are arranged on the puppeteers’ right and carried in his right hand, while the antagonists, demons and negative characters, appear on the puppeteers’ left. Thus, those viewing their shadows on the other side of the screen see the characters the other way around. So, too, in Kamasan paintings, the semi-divine heroes, Arjuna or Rama, for example, appear on the viewers’ left.¹⁹ This basis of painting in the shadow theatre and other performance arts means that there is an emphasis on figures rather than, for example, landscape. This is not to say that landscapes do not appear, but they appear as grounds upon which figures are arranged.

      Different regions of Bali have different ways of treating figures on backgrounds. Not all use the same left–right convention as Kamasan painting. Nearly all the traditional schools, however, fill their main spaces with small motifs called aun-aun or ‘haze’, representing dust particles in the air. This filling accords with Balinese ideas that there is no such thing as empty space, but rather concepts of areas that are ‘busy’ and ‘quiet’ (ramé and sepi), that operate on a spectrum of fullness and emptiness. In Balinese ideas of landscape, certain areas, such as deserted shorelines or conjunctions of rivers or mountains, are more potent, more charged with energy, than others, and can even be regarded as magically dangerous (tenget) or ‘hot’ (panas). Some spaces are ‘reserved’ (pingit) for spirits or people of power. So, too, areas of painting are more or less charged, and figures are arranged in relation to these areas, since they are connected to the characters’ actions. The unity of humanity and nature, of micro-and macrocosmos, is expressed through this sense of space, particularly how areas of painting can be charged with potentiality.²⁰

      In composing pictures, artists bring together these different areas of potentiality. Processes of composition are based on piecing together separate elements rather than utilizing an overarching perspective and creating a compositional ‘whole’. Kamasan painters and colourers traditionally have worked sitting on the ground, with the cloth of their paintings on their laps. This process has furthered the division of works into separate scenes, something found in other villages, even when easels have been introduced. Kamasan painters typically use rock or brick motifs around scenes for separation; the rocks are for natural or outdoor settings, the bricks for interiors. Sometimes scenes can overlap or lead onto each other, and in some cases the scene dividers actually point to the direction of the narrative flow.²¹ For interior scenes, the resulting compositions have a sense of a piling up of rectangular blocks. For natural scenes, Kamasan works typically have one dominant scene and one or more subordinate scenes, which give the appearance of being put on top of the main ground of the painting. Some major mythological themes are presented with great symmetry, and older Kamasan works often have a central tree or mountain, like the main world tree that is a feature of the puppet theatre. In such works, there is attention to hierarchical arrangements of deities. In other scenes involving kings and princes, similar kinds of ordered arrangements of figures according to rank are presented. This emphasis on hierarchy, however, is balanced by a fluidity of movement in older Kamasan works, and the results usually mitigate against any strong symmetry.²²

      Fig. 7 Dewa Kompiang Kandel Ruka, Batuan, Si Ngurah Batulepang. Gusti Ngurah Batulepang is known as a historical figure who ruled the area around Batuan in the 17th century. According to Balinese dynastic genealogies, his family lost power and was scattered after Batulepang showed disrespect to a priest who asked him for food. Batulepang threw him out, scattering rice on the ground. The priest cursed Batulepang, that his family would be dispersed, just as the rice was scattered, 1930s, washed pen and ink and crayon on paper, 27 x 36.5 cm, collected by A. G. de Mol, ex-Haks Collection, Singapore Batuan Collection (photo Ken Cheong).

      Fig. 8 Attributed to Modara, Kamasan, Arjuna and Suprabha as Incarnations of Smara and Ratih, c. 1820–30, traditional paint on wood, dimensions unknown, private collection (photo Gustra).

      Although they have not used the scene dividers found in Kamasan, painters from Batuan village have built up larger paintings by clustering and sometimes layering scenes. They refer to this organizational principle as mamedeg, a curious term that generally means ‘a pleasing arrangement’. The term itself comes from ‘woven matting’, bedeg, and provides a convenient metaphor for understanding paintings as the interweaving of different areas.²³

      The idea of arrangements of ‘interwoven’ spaces helps explain the ‘flattened’ nature of painted space in Balinese art in general. Some aspects of this flattening come from the shadow puppet theatre screen, but more generally there is a very different sense of perspective at work. This perspective is one inherited from ancient Javanese art, as presented on the temple reliefs of east Java.²⁴ Usually called a ‘bird’s-eye view’, it is more accurately a ‘gods’-eye view’, a vision looking down on the world from multiple or potentially infinite

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