collection (photo Gustra).
Brayut
In contrast to the sublime doings of the princes in the Malat, the story of the Brayut family presents peasant life (Fig. 40). Given that the artists of Kamasan were peasant farmers, there is great care in presenting the story of the impoverished and over-fertile Pan (father) and Men (mother) Brayut. Reversing gender roles, Pan Brayut does the cooking and other housework, looking after the eighteen children, while his wife lazes in bed.
The story is an excuse for artists to depict their temple festivals and making of offerings. A significant scene in the story comes later when Brayut’s son, Ketut Subaya, gets married in a parody of courtly heroics. The artists tended to go to town with depictions of the wedding, and of course of its consummation, with the pockmarked Ketut shown in bed with his demure new wife. Pan Brayut himself seeks the life of a hermit, meditating in a graveyard and resisting the assault of the ghosts and spirits sent by Durga. Eventually, he becomes a priest (Fig. 41).
Fig. 40 Kumpi Mesira, Kamasan, Brayut, c. 1910, traditional paint on Balinese cloth, 23 x 380 cm, ider-ider, from a temple in Takmung, Forge Collection, Australian Museum, E74195 (photo Emma Furno).
Calendars
Another way in which daily life and the greater cosmic scheme of things come together in Balinese paintings is in calendars. Bali has many complex calendrical systems, based mainly on discerning the quality of time, so that people can plan for ceremonies or other important events. Balinese do not necessarily celebrate birthdays according to annual calendars, but days of birth, as in other astrological systems, help to determine an individual’s character or nature, and it is important to know the correct offerings related to one’s day of birth.47
Star Calendars (Palelintangan)
Balinese calendars recognize many forms of weeks, from a one-day week to a seven-day week. A ‘month’ in Bali consists of the combination of a five-day and seven-day week, producing a thirty-five day cycle. These thirty-five day cycles are displayed in the frequently produced star calendars, or palelintangan. There calendars, as well as dealing with cosmic principles of the relationship between the divine and humanity, also serve as references, and thus usually have long explanatory texts in Balinese. Through calendars such as these, Balinese are able to know the nature of days of the month as they align with star signs. Knowing this, people can know whether days are auspicious or inauspicious.
The seven-day week starting Sunday (redite, soma, anggara, buda, wrespati, sukra, saniscara) is depicted in the top and bottom rows, each day governed by a deity with different attributes: a tree, bird, companion figure. The grid is formed by the five-day cycle shown from top to bottom (umanis, paing, pom, wage, kliwon), so that the first day of the ‘month’ is redite-umanis, governed by the star sign kala sungsang or upside-down demon. Redite is governed by the god Indra, whose companion figure (and also a wayang figure) is Panji or a minister, its tree the kayu putih, and its bird a siung or parrot, all of which are shown in the top left-hand panel of the painting. The other governing influences are shown in the bottom row and these consist, for redite, of a Garuda bird and an elephant-headed demon (Fig. 43).
Fig. 41 Kamasan, Brayut, 19th C, traditional paint on cloth, 72 x 213 cm, langse, Gunarsa Museum, USA (photo Gustra).
Earthquake Calendars (Palindon)
A different type of calendar depicts the character of months in which earthquakes occur. The first month, according to the Indian-based lunar calendar used in this system, is July. Each month is governed by a deity, and if earthquakes occur in that month, then other events will follow. Thus, if there is an earthquake in the first month (top right panel), Pertiwi, the Goddess of the Earth, is meditating, which means that the world will be prosperous, all the trees will bear fruit, and everything will be cheap, a situation that will continue for years.
The Balinese concept of causality displayed here is complicated. Deities do not directly cause the events predicted by each month’s earthquakes. Rather, the divine power or sakti of each deity’s meditation has sets of indirect consequences, including the earthquakes caused by the act of meditation. Events, good and bad, are indirect manifestations of divine power working in the world, and are not related to intentions (Fig. 42).
Fig. 42 I Nyoman Dogol, Kamasan, Palindon, 1930s, natural colours and lamp black on cloth, 172 x 216 cm, purchased 1989, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory Collection, IND01546.
Fig. 43 Pan Seken, Kamasan, Palelintangan, 1940s, traditional paint on Balinese cloth, 164 x 159 cm, Forge Collection, Australian Museum, E74230 (photo Emma Furno).
These earthquake calendars, like the depictions of Garuda challenging the gods, are typically made to be placed as the ceilings of pavilions, and so are also aligned with the directions.
The range of subjects of traditional paintings shows how much Balinese art is about more than simply storytelling. The narratives, and the non-narrative scenes such as are found in the calendars, are windows into the workings of divinity in the world. These are paintings about power, about the greater and smaller cosmos in operation, and about everyday life. While Balinese art was dramatically transformed in the twentieth century, such elements have remained constant.
Traditional painting in Bali is a living art. While I Nyoman Mandra (1946–) is the leading artist of the ‘classical’ Kamasan school, dozens of artists still work in his village. Mandra comes from an important family of artists, as his maternal grandfather was Kaki Rambug, probably the best of the painters working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mandra’s uncle was I Nyoman Dogol, also one of the leading painters of his generation (Fig. 1).
Keeping alive the tradition of Kamasan art is Mandra’s main motivation, and his school of young painters is the chief vehicle for doing this. Remembering his impoverished childhood, when he studied from his uncle by sketching images in the sand, he established his studio as a teaching centre so that young people in the village would have ready access to painting methods, materials and techniques. When he was still young, Mandra and his family would walk dozens of kilometres to the areas to which tourists were just beginning to come. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kamasan painters would sell their work for approximately US$1 per painting, walking from the main road junctions to sites such as Padang Bai to the east, Sanur to the south and Ubud to the west, as the trickle of visitors to Bali gradually turned into a stream.
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