Taro's Travels

This morning I had the opportunity to visit a Hindu Ceremony, but that would have blown my budget, so instead I hired a bike and cycled down the hill to the Monkey Forest Sanctuary. There, in a tamed rainforest setting (trees with masses of gnarled roots; moss everywhere; tiered beds with small broad-leaved plants; wide stone-walled paths) I fed bananas to one of three troupes of Balinese macaques that dwell there. Half the hand was dispersed in a leisurely fashion; the remaining fingers were dispersed in something resembling a panic as monkeys charged in and I began to fear for my own.

Afterwards I returned to my bike and cycled south along the eastern rim of the sanctuary, across a tiny wooden bridge and up onto a backroad. I spent the next few hours pleasantly lost along major roads of West and Southwest Ubud - passing stepped rice paddies in various stages of growth, workshops including batik painters and metal workers in addition to the range passed yesterday, quite a few garages and mechanics (given the number of motorbikes around, this is hardly surprising), and shop after shop after shop after shop after shop offering drinks and cigarettes.

On my way back, I stopped in at the Gaya gallery - a structure that from the front reminded me of a small Aztec pyramid, with the gallery below, and a restaurant at the top. The art in the main space was not to my taste, but the art in the small annex below the restaurant's northern stairs was - semi-photorealistic portraits - perhaps somewhat pop-art, but with a definite style and form.

Up until that point, no art I'd seen had appealed - Kuta had many monstrosities, perhaps produced on an assembly line; full of lurid colours and of a composition more suited in general to a teatowel than a wall. One particularly unpleasant one had Marilyn Monroe licking blood that was flowing from her eyes. Ubud - on my travels through town - was generally better but not much so (in a few cases artworks were pretty well identical - there's a canvas-filling frangipani design that's rather popular). This I found bizarre as three dimensional Balinese work - architecture, the carving of various materials, lacework, etc - has often been fantastic (Just the walls and gateways of many homes show so much craftsmanship as do some doors' bas reliefs).

Thankfully, the Neka Art Museum in Sanggingan, on Greater Ubud's major road, Jalan Raya restored my faith. The museum - a complex of six or seven buildings - is privately owned by a collector and art patron. Inside the collection included works traditional, abstract, cubist, folk-ish, sculptural, and photographic. There were a surprising number of paintings containing women posed not entirely unlike those of Gaugin, and an assortment of works with the founder and his family as subjects. The absolute standout were those paintings which used black linework (always) and ink washes (generally?) to present their scenes, generally showing large numbers of villagers and their surrounds. The effect of the detail (particularly of such things as leaves and feathers) was fractal but still organic. When I asked, I was told that it was the traditional Balinese style. If these paintings are viewed as 2d analogues to the 3d ones, then the Balinese works I like have definite outlines.