Bali Island

In Bali, women work, and men make art, they say. But that’s not entirely true. The girls dance and attend painting schools. They also make offerings. In Bali, art is to be understood as a mirror of religious thinking.

The Balinese learn from an early age to live with art and to understand it. All the things that are made have been decorated, painted and delicately carved since ancient tradition. All this was done to please the gods. The Balinese are said to be the most talented people on earth. On the mountain slopes, in the midst of rice terraces and palm groves in a beautiful landscape, veritable artists’ villages have developed. In Ubud is the center of painting and batik, the woodcarvers live in Mas, the gold and silversmith work mostly comes from Celuk.

The island of Bali is almost entirely of volcanic origin. The geologically youngest volcanoes are located in the east of the island. In the west of the island there are remains of volcanoes that are over a million years old. The island is characterized by volcanism. This is how the shape of the island came about. He also gave the island fertile soils. The last eruption was recorded in 1963.

A rectangular open pavilion, called Bale, with a roof made of palm leaves, is the basic element of Balinese architecture. On each family property there are several individual bales, each of which serves a different purpose, e.g. kitchen, bedroom, lounge, etc. Even large hotels and restaurants often have lobbies or dining halls modeled after the Bales.

Some temple complexes are equipped with bathing pools where the believers can cleanse themselves. This is a religious ritual. Stone sculptures used to serve purely traditional purposes and were used as temple decorations. Today, every hotel is decorated with them.

The sculptures of the richly decorated temples often seem to overflow in detail and complexity. The entrance gates of a temple, for example, are decorated centimetre by centimetre with decorations and have some demon faces to protect them from evil spirits.

However, the greatest architectural care is taken in the impressive temple complexes, even palaces seem modest compared to the most important Balinese temple complexes. Art in Bali, like almost everything else, was actually a sacred affair. The various gods were depicted, and these images were used as temple decorations.

Colors and proportions were fixed and did not follow the individual style of a single artist. The pictures were basically painted in the Wayang style. They were two-dimensional and flat. This traditional art can still be found today. In the 1930s, the painters Spies and Bonnet came to Ubud and taught the Balinese artists how to use new techniques.

The new content they taught fundamentally changed Balinese painting. Suddenly, the Balinese himself became the subject of the picture, e.g. the rice farmer, the landscape, the cockfight, etc. They also learned to deal with perspective and anatomy. The result was a new modern Balinese painting that combined traditional themes and modern techniques. What Spies and Bonnet taught, i.e. how to release the artistic creativity of a painter, is unfortunately being destroyed today by mass tourism.

With the Dutchman’s school, a new style has emerged that is colorful and naïve. It mainly shows pictures of Balinese landscapes, which are mainly bought by tourists. The quick and easy production of these pictures allows the artists to create these pictures en masse, which are then unfortunately often sold to tourists at the same price as a painting according to the old traditional painting method would achieve. Since the Balinese does not see himself as an artist – this word does not exist in the Balinese language – but as a craftsman, no great importance was attached to his own style.