Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Meeting the Great Artist

Ubud, Bali 1991
I sat uncomfortably on the edge of the visitors' couch pinching the tiny china cup between thumb and forefinger. Senor and Senora Blanco sat opposite. Antonio the great Balinese artist collapsed deep into the plump luxurious cushions of his chair in what was obviously meant to be a simulated state of exhaustion. Perched on the very edge of the second chair his wife seemed hardly able to contain her impatience. Or was it disregard? I had no idea, for her expression was inscrutable. Antonio on the other hand, jittered. His hands and feet were forever on the move.
He was quite a small man with an aquiline profile and delicate hands that he used extensively with an amazing variety of flowing movements to conduct his words each time he spoke. Such an intricate patterning of the air, they seemed to contain their own special eloquence. He wore a blue pom-pom beret cockily tilted forward over one eye with the studied care of a showoff. His shoulders were surprisingly wide for a small thin man.
I thought they may have owed some of that width to padding in the decorous shirt he wore underneath his loosely hanging paint-spotted smock.
The great artist didn't seem to have drunk any of his tea and he certainly hadn't reached for any of the biscuits on the black glass coffee table. I would have liked to take his second biscuit but the thought of reaching out to get one suddenly seemed a very difficult thing to do.
I felt the three of us could have gone on like that forever, all in their own worlds. Me thinking of the best way to bring up the subject of his promised interview, the great artist's wife still staring into space as if none of it was any of her business, and Blanco himself struggling to feign some kind of interest in the proceedings when it was obvious that he was still considering color mixes, perspective, shape and form. In his mind's eye painting on, treating the beautiful young body before him as nothing more or less than a smooth brown landscape of shaded contours and configurations that had to be examined minutely, centimetre by centimetre, moment by moment...
"I enjoyed your book," Antonio Blanco said. "I read it through just two days ago. A requirement for my wife's Balinese Hindu religion is that our four children have a tooth filing ceremony when they come of age...we had four done altogether. We had thousands of guests yet I managed to slip away and read your book. I refuse to make comments on it...the fact is it kept me occupied in the face of tumult...that, I think, speaks of my review."
I wasn't at all sure whether it was a good review or a bad one. I nodded back at Antonio Blanco inanely and forced myself to smile. I was surprised to see that the artist was nodding also.
"You do write very well," he said.
I smiled. "But not as well as Chechov." I meant it to be a joke because Blanco had told me earlier that his namesake Antonio Chechov was his favourite author.
But Blanco took my remark seriously. "Chechov, your own Patrick White, yourself, myself - we are all artists. All different, so fortunately we do not have to race like horses. There is no first, second and third, surely?
I couldn't have agreed more but I felt a bit put out because the artist's correction implied I didn't. My ego was rearing its ugly head.
"It should be like that," I said a little truculently, "but I'm afraid it's not. Not in Australia anyway."
Blanco smiled. "Correct me if I am wrong but it seems you feel let down maybe? Your race has been a little futile perhaps?"
"Not futile," I assured him. "More frustrating I would say."
"Ah, yes," Antonio Blanco said, "I understand. But perhaps it is you and not your work that suffers...if you had a little more faith in yourself you could perhaps overcome anything."
I wasn't sure that it was my faith that was lacking so I shrugged for want of a better reply.
It was Blanco who persisted. "You can do anything you want. It is up to you. Take us sitting here. Why are we here?"
"I've come to do an interview," I reminded him succinctly. “For the Australian magazines.”
"No, no, dear. You are here because it was ordained we should share this moment. That dove last week getting into my studio and you helping catch it. You lending me your book to explain yourself, that was the moment. If we really explore what can be done with each moment we may find we can do anything. We can think what we wish. I can think what I want to think and you what you want to think. Or we can talk, as we are doing now. We can change the course of our lives moment by moment, if we so wish. I can make sense of a scared bird frightening my model and crapping on my paintings, if in fact the end result is we are joined in friendly conversation over a cup of tea. The moment was offered and we have taken up that offer and made much of it."
I wasn't at all sure that the artist was entirely serious. "Are you talking about serendipity Antonio?"
"Serendipity? What is that?"
"It's a kind of accidental discovery we make that turns out to be fortunate."
Antonio Blanco raised one of his thick devilish eyebrows and said with some exasperation, "My dear, it is not a matter of accident, every moment can be fortunate, but it is only fortunate if we accept it for what it is, find the best of it and act upon it. This is the way we enrich our lives, moment by moment."
I thought it all sounded a little too pat but of course wasn't going to say. I was going over in my mind my plan of interview.
"Yes dear soul," Antonio Blanco continued. "There is little that mankind can't do. You are perhaps a catholic and think that only Jesus can perform miracles? But remember dear, Jesus only walked on water, man has walked on the moon."
The artist's wife didn't seem too impressed with her husband's revelation. She half-turned and stared resentfully at him for a brief moment and then returned her gaze into her own comfortable middle distance.
"Okay," I said. "But what if that person we are talking of is a poor fisherman, or rice farmer with only a small plot of land, what can he do to improve his lot moment by moment?"
"Well, my dear, no one expects fisher folk and rice farmers to walk on the moon if that's what you mean, but the fisherman can always continue to learn his trade can he not? And the rice farmer to improve the fertility of his land and grow better rice."
"It's not a lot though is it? It's not a big step for a man."
Antonio Blanco, sighed suddenly. "Maybe not for you or me who have escaped the tediousness of life via our respective art but for some it may well be all there is my dear and who is to say one man's moment is any less or more valuable than another's. It is only how each of us value our own moments that is important."
I was still searching for a suspected flaw in Antonio Blanco's argument. It implied a whiff of elitism, but before I could respond the phone rang.
The artist excused himself and picked up the receiver. There was a rapid conversation in Indonesian and then he put the phone down with a look of regret. "My dear," he said, "that was my agent in Jakarta who tells me my paintings are being demanded by the Americans and I must return to work and not stop until I am finished painting for this dreadful exhibition."
He offered me a fleeting smile as he jumped up from his chair. "Not even if I catch on fire, he tells me. So my dear I must go."
The famous artist reached both his long elegant hands across the coffee table and took hold of my reluctant one.
"Don't look so glum," he said, "being at the rich man's beck and call is the price you have to pay. You should well remember that, when you long so for success. But you know as well as I that it is not the art they want my dear, it is market value they seek. Those who really need our art can never afford us. It is one of the great ironies of capitalism don't you think."
Antonio Blanco hurried off then towards the curtained door that led to his studio. He was waving further goodbyes over his shoulder as he went, but then at the door he stopped suddenly and turned fully around. "By the way," he called back across the large visitors' room. "My dear, did you not come here to interview me?"
"Yes," I answered, "I did."
"Just as well for me you didn't get your interview," Antonio Blanco called cheerily. "I think I am a rather pretentious, self-opinionated man and it may have shown. I wouldn't have wanted too many to know that."
I was sure I could see a mischievous sparkle in the man's eyes even from that distance.
I could think of nothing else to do but smile back and when I returned my attention back to Senora Blanco, even though her eyes still seemed occupied with something that was happening out in the garden, I was surprised to see her smiling also.

(An almost interview with Antonio Blanco, Ubud, Bali,1991)

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