the usual black, while Siwa is said to be associated with the union of all colours.
A good way of understanding colour symbolism in Bali is provided by anthropologist Angela Hobart’s interviews with the makers of shadow puppets. She was informed that colours had a range of associations depending on whether they were considered ‘cool’ (tis) or ‘hot’ (panas), and whether they were ‘young’ (nguda) or ‘old’ (wayah). In this scheme, white and yellow are associated with degrees of ‘young’ and with purity, and black with ‘age’, while red is associated with heat and danger or emotions such as anger.14
Realism
Artists and texts talk about ‘giving life’ in the artistic process. ‘Giving life’ refers in part to accuracy of representation, a Balinese sense of realism very different from that found in the West.15 Legends of Sangging Prabangkara, the ancestral painter/craftsman, makes this clear. There are many versions of this story, all with different forms of his name. In one, the High King of Klungkung summons Sangging to construct a palace filled with statues, which he does. The king then orders Sangging to make a portrait of the queen, which he accomplishes ably. The king then sends him out on missions to depict all sorts of creatures. He goes into the forest and makes pictures of all the animals of the forest. Then, having been provided with a crystal vessel by the king, Sangging depicts all the creatures of the sea. Finally, he is sent on a giant kite up into the sky to depict what is there, but he climbs so high that he reaches heaven, which Sangging finds to be very beautiful. He decides to stay there and not go back to the mortal realm.
In one variant of this story, the artist is ordered to make a portrait of the queen. Sangging does this with great skill, depicting her naked. However, a fly lands on the pubic area of the painting of the queen, and it so happens that the queen has a mole in that location. The king, thinking the artist has viewed his wife naked and had sex with her, cuts off the artist’s right arm and sends him off into the forest.
In a third story, the painter is sent out by a king who is looking for a wife. Sangging makes portraits of a number of princesses, including one whom he observed bathing. The king is so impressed by the image of the naked princess that he sends his troops out to abduct her and force her to become his wife. The implication is that this is indeed a portrait, something that renders the features of an individual.
In these legends, there is no differentiation between drawing and painting; the word gambar is used for both. In some literary texts, the term citra—‘painting’, ‘picture’, ‘sketch’ or ‘letter’—is used, as is the term tika, meaning ‘writing’ or ‘drawing’, but also ‘a slate’. The term wimba or ‘image’ is also employed for an artwork. The ability to draw is one of the recognized skills (gina), a word that can cover the English meanings of ‘art’ and ‘craft’, since it is used, for example, of dancers (pragina). A great artist is someone who is clever or wise (wikan, ririh, duèg) at what he does. Sangging is, in fact, a generic term for ‘artist’. A sangging is also someone skilled in other arts, as in the first story where Sangging builds a beautiful palace and fills it with statues. Drawing should result in a likeness that is exact (patuh), that has a sameness of appearance. As for Sangging’s achievements as an artist in the first story, he finds perfection in heaven, where everything is melah-melah, meaning both ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’.16
These stories all indicate that an artist is someone who can reproduce form (warna, goba) with skill. Despite what Western viewers may consider the stylized nature of Balinese art, it is intended by Balinese artists to be an image of reality. As all the stories make clear, portraiture is a strong part of Balinese tradition. When Danish trader Mads Lange lived in south Bali in the first half of the nineteenth century, he had his portrait painted by a local artist, an image of the essential figure of Lange as mediated by Balinese visual traditions.
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
