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Lot Essay
What sets Hendra Gunawan apart from his Indonesian contemporaries is his use of the portrayal of the 'everydayness'to echo the political undertones of the time in which he lived in. With the fall of Sukarno came the inevitability to correlate genre painting with the 'evils' of the Ancien Regime and with communism. Though Hendra has been held in esteem as being the most prolific of Indonesian 'communist artists, one should not merely look for the political in his work but the social as well. Though Hendra's earlier work is better known, it is in his later work from the 6o's and 70's that his genius for colour and the full development of his own particular style become evident. His later paintings are melancholic and emotional as a result of the hardships that he experienced during his thirteen years in Bandung's Kebon Waru ,prison.
It is in Hendra's Nursing the Neighbour's Baby that the qualities, associated with his later artistic development, are dramatically orchestrated. Hendra portrays three women sitting in a close huddle with the woman on the extreme right of the scene, exuding a sense of grief and pain that is the result of her sickness and therefore her inability to nurse her own baby whose head is denoted by the concentric red circles on its cap. It is common practice in rural areas in Indonesia to nurse someone else's baby if the mother of the baby is sick or if there is another woman who happens to have a baby of her own especially if they are unable to buy proper baby-food. It is further made evident to the viewer that she is suffering because Hendra has depicted a herbal leaf remedy pressed to her forehead and her face is rendered pale. The neighbour in the middle of the grouping has come to relieve the baby of his hunger and thus indirectly alleviate the mother's feelings of guilt. However the mother's expression conveys the emotion that her sense of guilt is further heightened by this act of kindness and she is seen in a state of self-reproach. The neighbour in the middle is made the antithesis of the mother on the right. She is calm and her fulfillment is born out of her fulfilling the hunger of the baby. The baby's contentment is portrayed through the sense of contentment on her face.
The third woman on the left is arranging the neighbour's hair but her attention is transfixed somewhere outside of the picture frame and thus this challenges the viewer to find out what has made her head turn and upset the 'harmony' of the composition. If her head was turned towards the neighbour breastfeeding the child, it would have meant the completion of a circle that began in the head of the mother on the right and progressed through the laps of the women and then through the arm of the woman on the left. We are left to wonder whether she is expecting someone or that she has been surprised or that she has found the answer to the mother's pain. Hendra himself gave the answer that this question begged. The plant painted on the left side acts as a framing element and boundary so as to stop the divertion of the viewer's attention and to guide it back to the central focus of this painting. The painting is a portrayal of a wife of a political prisoner who is sick with grief for her absent and captive husband.
Hendra has rendered the three women as being distinct from each other because of their separate facial expressions but they seemingly share one unified lower torso that is expressed through a melange of many contrasting colours. This unification of the three lower torsos tightens the bold figural composition. Notice the ingenious handling of the palette knife that rendered the calf of the central woman's lap in a vibrant combination of red, yellow and green.He also went against conventional rules of painting by employing two contrasting colours - red and green. He merges them through the gradual introduction of strands of the opposing colour in the area where the other colour remains dominant. For example the predominantly green distant background is shattered with a streak of red cloud. The wandering eye of the viewer needs a place where it can rest and this is a need that is recognised as it is in all of Hendra's works that he usually paints neutral colours in an area large enough for it to be a spot of visual rest. In this painting, the 'neutral zones' are the chest of the nursing neighbour and the face of the suffering mother.
Though painted in 1977, it is dated 1975 because Hendra was imprisoned at this time and every new painting that he wanted to sell, had to go through the prison warden who was notorious for sometimes demanding up to 80 of the price of the painting. This painting was smuggled out of the prison in a bamboo container. At this time, the prison warden sometimes went to Hendra's house and thus the reason why it is dated earlier is that it could be claimed that this work was an earlier unsold work.
As with other works depicting women, Hendra's women are types and not clearly distinguishable individuals. This lends a sense of vagueness to the women's roles and the their interpretations. 'One might say that, for various biographical and political reasons, he chooses to use the female form to signify the greater truth and beauty of the land and people which he simultaneously celebrates and longs for in his work' (Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit and Mountain-Preoccupations of Contempoary Indonesian Painters, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1994, p177.
It is in Hendra's Nursing the Neighbour's Baby that the qualities, associated with his later artistic development, are dramatically orchestrated. Hendra portrays three women sitting in a close huddle with the woman on the extreme right of the scene, exuding a sense of grief and pain that is the result of her sickness and therefore her inability to nurse her own baby whose head is denoted by the concentric red circles on its cap. It is common practice in rural areas in Indonesia to nurse someone else's baby if the mother of the baby is sick or if there is another woman who happens to have a baby of her own especially if they are unable to buy proper baby-food. It is further made evident to the viewer that she is suffering because Hendra has depicted a herbal leaf remedy pressed to her forehead and her face is rendered pale. The neighbour in the middle of the grouping has come to relieve the baby of his hunger and thus indirectly alleviate the mother's feelings of guilt. However the mother's expression conveys the emotion that her sense of guilt is further heightened by this act of kindness and she is seen in a state of self-reproach. The neighbour in the middle is made the antithesis of the mother on the right. She is calm and her fulfillment is born out of her fulfilling the hunger of the baby. The baby's contentment is portrayed through the sense of contentment on her face.
The third woman on the left is arranging the neighbour's hair but her attention is transfixed somewhere outside of the picture frame and thus this challenges the viewer to find out what has made her head turn and upset the 'harmony' of the composition. If her head was turned towards the neighbour breastfeeding the child, it would have meant the completion of a circle that began in the head of the mother on the right and progressed through the laps of the women and then through the arm of the woman on the left. We are left to wonder whether she is expecting someone or that she has been surprised or that she has found the answer to the mother's pain. Hendra himself gave the answer that this question begged. The plant painted on the left side acts as a framing element and boundary so as to stop the divertion of the viewer's attention and to guide it back to the central focus of this painting. The painting is a portrayal of a wife of a political prisoner who is sick with grief for her absent and captive husband.
Hendra has rendered the three women as being distinct from each other because of their separate facial expressions but they seemingly share one unified lower torso that is expressed through a melange of many contrasting colours. This unification of the three lower torsos tightens the bold figural composition. Notice the ingenious handling of the palette knife that rendered the calf of the central woman's lap in a vibrant combination of red, yellow and green.He also went against conventional rules of painting by employing two contrasting colours - red and green. He merges them through the gradual introduction of strands of the opposing colour in the area where the other colour remains dominant. For example the predominantly green distant background is shattered with a streak of red cloud. The wandering eye of the viewer needs a place where it can rest and this is a need that is recognised as it is in all of Hendra's works that he usually paints neutral colours in an area large enough for it to be a spot of visual rest. In this painting, the 'neutral zones' are the chest of the nursing neighbour and the face of the suffering mother.
Though painted in 1977, it is dated 1975 because Hendra was imprisoned at this time and every new painting that he wanted to sell, had to go through the prison warden who was notorious for sometimes demanding up to 80 of the price of the painting. This painting was smuggled out of the prison in a bamboo container. At this time, the prison warden sometimes went to Hendra's house and thus the reason why it is dated earlier is that it could be claimed that this work was an earlier unsold work.
As with other works depicting women, Hendra's women are types and not clearly distinguishable individuals. This lends a sense of vagueness to the women's roles and the their interpretations. 'One might say that, for various biographical and political reasons, he chooses to use the female form to signify the greater truth and beauty of the land and people which he simultaneously celebrates and longs for in his work' (Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit and Mountain-Preoccupations of Contempoary Indonesian Painters, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1994, p177.