Batik Masks

How to convert old, much-cherished, Javanese and Balinese batik sarongs into something useful in this year of pandemia? Memories of favorite fabrics from the past re-purposed into well-made masks? Why not?

Dana Cooper, a Bermuda-based designer, suggested I call Pauline Lock at In Style USA in NYC’s garment district. Pauline said, “Let’s see what we can do….”

Most of the sarongs had a single tear where they’d received the most wear.

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Plenty of material–including some from other non-Indonesian, non-batik fabric–to make enough masks for Christmas presents to extended family.

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One of those old pieces was an almost 50-year-old George McGovern t-shirt that I’d embroidered while sailing from Hawai’i to Tahiti in 1971.

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The three pieces on the left above are first layers of non-batik textile. The second piece from the right is the middle layer of DuPont Silvadur antimicrobial fabric, and the interior layer of fine soft cotton is on the right.

InDesign’s people measured and cut all the fabric and manufactured 58 masks over a couple of working days…

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… and delivered them in time for close-to-Christmas mailing,….

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and every one recalls memories from the past four decades.

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The Storytelling Art of Bali: Wayang Painting from Temples to Tourism

An exhibition opening on Monday, October 24, at the Consulate General of Indonesia in New York, will feature twenty-one 19th and 20th-century paintings and drawings that illustrate 100 years of evolution of Balinese wayang painting from precolonial times to the present.

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The show includes large antique paintings created for Balinese temples and royal houses telling the Hindu-Buddhist stories of Bali’s shadow theater as well as more recent work showing the evolution of this art to smaller formats created for contemporary family temples in Bali and for Indonesian and foreign collectors.

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“Preparations for a Festival in the Court of Prince Panji” by Nyoman Serenkog, a woman artist from the village of Kamasan, in a 2013 museum exhibition in Bali.

The exhibition will be open Monday through Friday, from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, October 24 through November 7, 2016, at the Indonesian Consulate, 5 East 68th Street, New York, NY.

The two posts that follow just below show the other 20 paintings and drawings in the exhibition.

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Paintings 1-10 at the “Storytelling Art of Bali”
exhibition at the Consulate General of Indonesia, 5 E. 68th St. New
York, NY. The exhibition is open Monday to Friday from 10 AM to 4 PM
from Monday, October 24 through Monday, November 7, 2016.

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Paintings 11-20 at the “Storytelling Art of Bali” exhibition at the Consulate General of Indonesia, 5 E. 68th St. New York, NY. The exhibition is open Monday to Friday from 10 AM to 4 PM from Monday, October 24 through Monday, November 7, 2016.

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“Garuda, Wibiwasu, and Supratika,” a 19th century Balinese temple painting from Karangasem, shown here at the top as it was purchased in 1973 and last exhibited at Ubud’s Museum Puri Lukisan in 2013, and below as cleaned and completely restored in Bali in 2015. The unrestored painting appears with the story on page 44 of the exhibition catalog, Ketut Madra and 100 Years of Balinese Wayang Painting.

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Bali’s invisible world made visible and rapturous, by Ron Jenkins

The aptly titled volume illuminates not only the exquisite lines of Lempad’s artwork, but also the intangible elements of Balinese identity that those lines represent.

Lempad’s depiction of the moment of birth, for instance, uses simple black ink lines on paper to portray a baby emerging from the womb, but the midwife and the father are not looking at the child.

They are battling the otherworldly creatures that are scrambling to grab the newborn at the precarious moment when the first breath is drawn. The father embraces his wife with one arm while brandishing a knife at the fanged demon that is gnawing at her forehead.

The midwife is holding the infant’s head in her hand as she positions herself to block the advance of another demon with a frog dangling from its toes. Offerings of fruit, flowers and coconuts are positioned directly below the child’s head, providing an element of supernatural protection in this ferocious struggle of life against death.

Bali’s invisible world is made visible in Lempad’s rapturous line drawings. With an astonishing economy of means, he brings to life the sacred and mundane elements of Balinese culture with all their contradictions on display.


Lempad dancer museum swedenThe tall mythic heroes of the Ramayana and Mahabharata are accompanied by their short squat servants. A lowly dog guides a saint on the path to heaven. A menacing ogre has a symbol of otherworldly power engraved on one of his fangs. On the other fang is the image of a tourist. The virtuoso technique of Lempad’€™s drawings call to mind the masterpieces of Picasso, Leonardo, and Botticelli, but the style and subject matter bear the signature of inimitable genius. No one else could have created such unforgettable images of the heroine Kumasari. Raised in the forest by her widowed father, Kumasari embodies the feminine power of the natural world. When a jealous suitor sends an onslaught of monsters to attack her, Kumasari defeats them by standing still in a pose of silent meditation while her husband runs in the opposite direction.  In another drawing Lempad illustrates Kumasari’€™s closeness to the nature by depicting her on the back of a tiger, the contours of her body almost disappearing into the shapes of the other wild animals that are defending her. Lempad’€™s Kusumasari is a tropical wonder woman, an Amazonian beauty whose enemies fall upside down from the skies at her feet, literally upended by the unseen force of her will. The texts that accompany these extraordinary artworks were written by a team of scholars and specialists under the leadership of Bruce Carpenter.  Each essay offers fascinating insights that are the result of impressive research. H.I.R. Hinzler’€™s archival detective work uncovers a letter that suggests the children in Lempad’€™s drawings of Men Brayut represent the 18 letters of the Balinese aksara alphabet.  Bruce Carpenter refutes the myth that Lempad’€™s best work was inspired by his Western patrons. Soemantri Widagdo unearths a revealing story about a painter who asked Lempad why he sometimes worked on his drawings upside down.  Lempad’€™s answered that he wanted to make the drawing perfect from all directions. This book provides ample evidence that he came as close as humanly possible to achieving that elusive goal.

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