THE GUIDE - The Rough Guide to Bali and Lombok - page 192

Though the Ubud style is more naturalistic than wayang art, the pictures are still unrealist-
ically crammed with busyness and activity , every corner filled with detail. Every palm leaf
and blade of grass is painstakingly delineated, every sarong pattern described, but people
are rarely given much individuality, their faces usually set in a rather stylized expression.
Most of the best-known Ubud-style artists are represented in the major Ubud art mu-
seums, among them the highly rated Anak Agung Gede Sobrat .
PENGOSEKAN STYLE
During the 1960s, a group of young painters working in the Ubud style and living in the
village of Pengosekan on the outskirts of Ubud came up with a new approach, subsequently
known as the Pengosekan style . From the Ubud-style pictures, the Pengosekan school
isolated just a few components, specifically the birds , butterflies , insects and flowering
plants , and magnified them to fill a whole canvas. The best Pengosekan paintings look
delicate and lifelike, generally depicted in soothing pastels, and reminiscent of classical
Japanese flower and bird pictures - some fine examples can be seen in the Community of
Artists showroom run by the descendants of the original Pengosekan artists, in their vil-
lage, as well as in the Seniwati Gallery in Ubud.
BATUAN STYLE
In contrast to the slightly romanticized visions of events being painted by the Ubud-style
artists in the 1930s, a group of painters in nearby Batuan were taking a more quizzical
approach. Like the wayang artists, Batuan-style painters filled their works with scores of
people, but on a much more frantic scale. A single Batuan-style picture might contain a
dozen apparently unrelated scenes - a temple dance, a rice harvest, a fishing expedition, an
exorcism and a couple of tourists taking snapshots - all depicted in fine detail that strikes
a balance between the naturalistic and the stylized. By clever juxtaposition, the best Batu-
an artists, such as the Neka Art Museum exhibitors I Wayan Bendi , I Made Budi and Ni
Wayan Warti , can turn their pictures into amusing and astute comments on Balinese so-
ciety. Works by their precursors, the original Batuan artists Ida Bagus Made Togog and
Ida Bagus Made Wija , focused more on the darker side of village life, on the supernatural
beings that hang around the temples and forests, and on the overwhelming sense of men
and women as tiny elements in a forceful natural world.
YOUNG ARTISTS STYLE
A second flush of artistic innovation hit the Ubud area in the 1960s, when a group of teen-
age boys from Penestanan started producing unusually expressionistic works, painting
everyday scenes in vibrant, non-realistic colours. Encouraged by Dutch artist and Penest-
anan resident Arie Smit , who gave them materials and helped organize exhibitions, they
soon became known as the Young Artists , a tag now used to describe work by anyone in
that same style. The style is indisputably childlike, even naive: the detailed, mosaic-like