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ocal street artists make the most of vacant public spaces around Denpasar. They changed sidewalk walls full of scratches and advertising posters into murals.

Only by spreading mobile phone messages and making phone calls, professional painters and art school students flocked Friday to the corner of Jalan Tukad Balian in Renon.

“It is easy to attract fellow painters to create murals. We have the same spirit of expressing our ideas on public spaces,” said I Wayan “Donal” Januariawan, who led the “Street Art wave” action that day.

“For street artists, finding a 10-meter sidewalk wall full of graffiti and advertising posters is like finding an oasis,” said Donal of the Pentatonik Art Community.

The house owner allowed the painters to apply their drawings on the three-meter high wall.

With their acrylic paint and brush, the painters looked for their own spaces. Within two hours almost 80 percent of the wall was filled with artwork bringing various messages and themes.

I Ketut Linggih, a painter from Karangasem, painted characters of little monsters with his orange tint.

“We make these drawings spontaneously. We’re having fun with this wall,” said Linggih, adding that he did not want to convey verbal messages through his murals.

The youngest painter is Sudarsana, a student of a fine arts high school in Gianyar. He painted the wall with the Spongebob cartoon character, but with dark colors of grey, black and blue, not as colorful as the original. Various styles of painting, such as realist, abstract and figurative, blended on the wall, changing the corner of the city.

As afternoon set in, some other painters joined the action. One of them was Hazel, a woman from Scotland who lives in Bali. She asked others what she could do to add finishing touch to the artwork.

Some painters allowed her to respond to their work. She then chose to modify the drawing of an elephant by adding more accents and colors. She also collaborated with Fuad, a painter from Ubud that she had just met.

They did not need to discuss what to draw or which was the better color, as if they were communicating through the sweep of their paint brushes.

”We just need some space to fill. A mural is media to meet friends and have fun,” said Donal, who rejected the idea to make the mural without the consent of the home owner. Donal said that he also did not covey a specific message or theme in his murals.

His stance contradicts Komunitas Pojok (the Corner Community), one of the prominent mural communities full of social critics. , They recently made murals on sidewalk walls criticizing the development of tourism in Bali, which they believe marginalizes poor people and is ridden with collusion.

They also initiated the July billboard festival by moving the drawings from walls to billboards.

“We want to invite all people to take part. Everybody could be a painter by expressing their feelings and let others see,” said community rep Wiss H.P.

The billboard festival not only involved mural artists from Bali, but also from Yogyakarta and East Java. They created 12 billboards with various themes exhibited at the Puputan Badung field, including the drawing that queried the effort to preserve Balinese tradition. It pictured a woman carrying religious offerings while pointing her middle finger.

“Tourism demands that local traditions are preserved. But on the other hand, local people are forced to sell their land for tourist businesses,” Wiss said.

He said the murals represented the expression that art is not exclusive, as it could be enjoyed by everybody in public spaces, as long as it is not about race or pornography.

Other mural communities bring environmental messages in their pictures, including one at the south end of Jalan Nusa Indah near the Art Centre. The artists filled the eight-meter wall with drawings of various themes, such as traffic jams, garbage, spatial problems, criminality and “Bring Back my Bali”.

JP/Luh De Suriyani