In 1977, while living in Copenhagen, Denmark I took off for half a year and went to Bali, Indonesia … where I met Leesa. After meeting her family in Australia she came to Copenhagen, we got married and had a baby, Radjin, a.k.a. Rad. But Copenhagen was too cold, so we came to Australia in 1979.
On Bali I rented this little hut among rice paddies, from Sumung, the son of the painter I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, of Ubud. My abode was a few kilometres outside Ubud … I stayed there for a few months.
This is the painter I Gusti Nyoman Lempad with his wife and son, Sumung. Lempad was 115 years old; he lived on a glass of water per day and a cup of rice once a week … he died a year later. Below one of his paintings and a bunch of his artworks … sculptures and carvings.
Lempad and Sumung’s family.
The stone carver Cumul and his family.
The painter Radjin. He was principal of the Batuan school of painting. Radjin told me he painted for two hours in the morning and two in the evening; he produced three or four paintings a year …
… the style of which he had learnt from his father, Djata.
One of their students was Murtika.
This is the (anonymous) wood carver … he carved the frames for my paintings with putting motives from the pictures into the design of the frames. He also taught me wood carving 🙂 one of the reasons why I stayed on Bali for so many months was because this process: collecting and photographing and printing pictures of the paintings as reference for the carver, and then carving the frames – from a single piece of teak wood – took weeks.
The vulcano Gunung Agung and below, three stages of rice fields.
I became friends with John Darling, who introduced me to the painter Donald Friend … both of them lived on Bali more or less permanently.
