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Lot Essay
"But now for me comes the most difficult thing - I must judge my own painting. I always judge my own paintings in two ways. First, I see if it is good enough. Did I make any mistake? Here, I ask like a jury in an exhibition."
- Affandi
"Then comes the difficult part. Do I find the feeling that I wanted to put in it back in the painting? Here, I have to be honest with myself. It is not easy to be your own judge but of one thing I'm sure - what I see is the result of my feeling (and) emotion of that moment and that moment has passed, I can't do nothing anymore."
- Affandi on the completion of At The Beach
Affandi's art was rooted in the direct observation of the world around him, which he transformed to express his personal inner vision. His commitment to painting daily scenes of Indonesian life was a life-long passion as he depicted the most beautiful aspects of his homeland. To capture the essence of each situation or object, he painted and repainted a core group of subjects which include scenes of Indonesian life, the sun, his self-portrait, and of course the expansive beach scene as seen in the present lot, At The Beach (Lot 4).
AN ABSTRACT REALITY
The abstract qualities of At The Beach, and indeed of Affandi's expressionist mode of painting through the direct application of paint onto canvas straight from the paint tube, are subjects not often discussed. Affandi has always described his art as realist or naturalist in nature, and this self-description admits little of how the world around him is in fact distilled in an abstract fashion in his paintings.
At first glance, and even with a closer look, the enormous swirls of paint that depicts the break of waves on a beach is not easily decipherable, until the whole panoramic span of the painting has been taken into account. When one sees the painting in its entirety, the horizon line comes into perspective, along with the looming cliff heads at the beach in which Affandi most regularly painted, Pantai Parangtritis which lies approximately 30 kilometres south of Yogyakarta in the centre of Java.
The artist renders foam in close successive strokes of white paint between the dominant green and blue, depicting the break of waves on shore. The powerful and spectacular occurrence of nature is brilliantly captured by the sheer mass of impasto of white, green and blue in the centre of the composition. Affandi's beach scene manages to momentarily capture the intense latent energy of nature at work, and is a testament to the true expressionistic quality of his works. Yet what he is depicting goes beyond the realm of what can be captured by a realist or naturalist artist. The abstract quality of time and force of nature actuated in At The Beach is what sets Affandi apart from other artists, and places him in an interesting counterpoint to other commonly acknowledged artists working in an abstract language.
Like other great artists of the 20th century, Affandi distinguishes himself with a truly outstanding artistic language rooted in the expressive qualities of line. Each line in his painting, be it a short curl of impasto, or a longer trail of paint scrawled across the surface of the canvas, is an articulate line brimming with purpose. His lines outline objects, and oftentimes constitute an object like a small figure and represent things in an abbreviated fashion, as seen in the waves here in At The Beach. His finesse in handling lines puts him in direct comparison with artists contemporaneous to him such as Wu Guanzhong or Jackson Pollock. His deft line work precedes and serves as an interesting comparison to the efforts of Zeng Fanzhi's recent line-based landscape paintings. In a global history of art, Affandi's works are ripe for examination along the line-based works of these other Asian and Western artists and in no other artwork is such an examination as appropriate as in At The Beach.
HUNGRY TO PAINT
"When I paint, I have to do it non-stop. I just follow my feelings."
- Affandi
In 1982, the Indonesian State Film Production Centre worked in collaboration with Mayagita Audio Visual Production House to make a video profile of Affandi titled Affandi - Hungry to Paint in which Affandi was filmed painting At The Beach from start to end. As seen in the video, painting takes on a performative nature for Affandi. When he painted, Affandi stayed close to the ground, laying his easel low. Many a time, he preferred to sit or squat rather than stand. Art historian Astri Wright observes that the artist's "squeezing and smearing of paint from the tubes on to the canvas, working it with his fingers, palms, wrists and the back of his hands" adds an intrinsically humanistic texture to each painting, as though imbued with the artist's personal life force. Painting takes on phenomenological proportions, as Affandi seeks to feel at one with his subject. We see him variously tackling the canvas, pausing to contemplate his work in progress and finally appraising the finished painting with critical eyes.
- Affandi
"Then comes the difficult part. Do I find the feeling that I wanted to put in it back in the painting? Here, I have to be honest with myself. It is not easy to be your own judge but of one thing I'm sure - what I see is the result of my feeling (and) emotion of that moment and that moment has passed, I can't do nothing anymore."
- Affandi on the completion of At The Beach
Affandi's art was rooted in the direct observation of the world around him, which he transformed to express his personal inner vision. His commitment to painting daily scenes of Indonesian life was a life-long passion as he depicted the most beautiful aspects of his homeland. To capture the essence of each situation or object, he painted and repainted a core group of subjects which include scenes of Indonesian life, the sun, his self-portrait, and of course the expansive beach scene as seen in the present lot, At The Beach (Lot 4).
AN ABSTRACT REALITY
The abstract qualities of At The Beach, and indeed of Affandi's expressionist mode of painting through the direct application of paint onto canvas straight from the paint tube, are subjects not often discussed. Affandi has always described his art as realist or naturalist in nature, and this self-description admits little of how the world around him is in fact distilled in an abstract fashion in his paintings.
At first glance, and even with a closer look, the enormous swirls of paint that depicts the break of waves on a beach is not easily decipherable, until the whole panoramic span of the painting has been taken into account. When one sees the painting in its entirety, the horizon line comes into perspective, along with the looming cliff heads at the beach in which Affandi most regularly painted, Pantai Parangtritis which lies approximately 30 kilometres south of Yogyakarta in the centre of Java.
The artist renders foam in close successive strokes of white paint between the dominant green and blue, depicting the break of waves on shore. The powerful and spectacular occurrence of nature is brilliantly captured by the sheer mass of impasto of white, green and blue in the centre of the composition. Affandi's beach scene manages to momentarily capture the intense latent energy of nature at work, and is a testament to the true expressionistic quality of his works. Yet what he is depicting goes beyond the realm of what can be captured by a realist or naturalist artist. The abstract quality of time and force of nature actuated in At The Beach is what sets Affandi apart from other artists, and places him in an interesting counterpoint to other commonly acknowledged artists working in an abstract language.
Like other great artists of the 20th century, Affandi distinguishes himself with a truly outstanding artistic language rooted in the expressive qualities of line. Each line in his painting, be it a short curl of impasto, or a longer trail of paint scrawled across the surface of the canvas, is an articulate line brimming with purpose. His lines outline objects, and oftentimes constitute an object like a small figure and represent things in an abbreviated fashion, as seen in the waves here in At The Beach. His finesse in handling lines puts him in direct comparison with artists contemporaneous to him such as Wu Guanzhong or Jackson Pollock. His deft line work precedes and serves as an interesting comparison to the efforts of Zeng Fanzhi's recent line-based landscape paintings. In a global history of art, Affandi's works are ripe for examination along the line-based works of these other Asian and Western artists and in no other artwork is such an examination as appropriate as in At The Beach.
HUNGRY TO PAINT
"When I paint, I have to do it non-stop. I just follow my feelings."
- Affandi
In 1982, the Indonesian State Film Production Centre worked in collaboration with Mayagita Audio Visual Production House to make a video profile of Affandi titled Affandi - Hungry to Paint in which Affandi was filmed painting At The Beach from start to end. As seen in the video, painting takes on a performative nature for Affandi. When he painted, Affandi stayed close to the ground, laying his easel low. Many a time, he preferred to sit or squat rather than stand. Art historian Astri Wright observes that the artist's "squeezing and smearing of paint from the tubes on to the canvas, working it with his fingers, palms, wrists and the back of his hands" adds an intrinsically humanistic texture to each painting, as though imbued with the artist's personal life force. Painting takes on phenomenological proportions, as Affandi seeks to feel at one with his subject. We see him variously tackling the canvas, pausing to contemplate his work in progress and finally appraising the finished painting with critical eyes.