The Painters, by Yuleng Ben Tallar

Nunung Bakhtiar

Memadu Cinta, acrilic on canvas

The Painters *

            She was born on the 14th of June, 1952, in Malang, East Java, Indonesia. She loved to draw and to paint since young. She got her talent from her father. She was Javanese dancer before. Her painting objects are flowers and surrounding nature, including landscape.

            A realist by instinct and comtemplative by choice, Nunung remains modest behind her somewhat aloof facade. Discreetly but genuinely generous, she is wary of words and prefers action; her view of world is deep. While she pretends to see nothing or only what she is shown, her sharp mind notes everything; vocabulary, mimicry, gestures, behaviour, and postures. Expressions on canvas give a better idea of her subjects more than painting with strict realism could ever show.

Nunung is an artist and a sensitive woman with a warm smile emanating goodness to all that she loves. She has long practiced martial arts and understands how to control her instinct and aggressions.

In Nunung works painting becomes a mode of being; colour is not seen as separate from the sensitivity to plastic form. For her form does not exist without colour and, reciprocally, colour does not exist without form. Colour, in its power and concentration, is necessarily complex; it is the whole spectrum of the pallete.

In colour, she finds the balance to anchor her aesthetics. Colours flave like fiveworks in her bouquets; one is stunned by the sumptuousness of her reds and yellow, by the depth of her blues.

Nunung keeps the best of her modulations, accentuations, and nuances for bright coloured flowers, whose character and even scent she revives with a single patch of colour in the simplest shape. She composes bouquets with flowers that are as much a dream as they are a reality.

Once she has decided on the setting of colour, Nunung no longer needs the drawing. By using her thumb or pressing the pallete knife she “throws herself” onto the canvas. She some times barely touches the surface, gliding across it; at other times she lashes out, spreading the colour paste with a spetula or a finger. She freely kneads the colour paste which is full of surprises. Her mixtures produce bright colour tones.

·         Yuleng Ben Tallar