Of East Java’s population of 75 million, at least half a million are cataract blind. A 10 minute operation could lift the shadows from their eyes that hamper every facet of daily life.
The Bali-based foundation Yayasan Manusia, or the John Fawcett Foundation, has been for more than a decade working to restore sight to many of these people and other cataract victims across the archipelago, according to 73-year-old Indonesian-born artist John van der Sterren, who is donating proceeds from his Ubud exhibition to the foundation.
He said the foundation offers free medical treatment to all, regardless of color, creed or religion.
“A large percentage of funding for the John Fawcett Foundation comes out of Australia; this is a foundation that really needs support and that support also needs to come from local people,” said Van der Sterren ahead of the exhibit opening last Friday.
The “Colorful Horizons” paintings and charcoals that make up the exhibition tell of Van der Sterren’s deep affection for his birth country; oil paintings of Balinese temples, the immaculate Borobudur temple in central Java where the artist now lives and other slices of daily life that make up this diverse nation.
Born in West Java in 1938, Van der Sterren was third generation Dutch Indonesian, and despite emigrating to New Zealand in 1951 says “once you have lived in Indonesia, it never leaves your heart. That is why so many people come back. This country has a magical attraction, a magic pull. As a child, leaving Indonesia was a painful experience,”
That pain was felt despite Van der Sterren’s incarceration in Japanese concentration camps and the turmoil rippling across Indonesia as it sliced its ties with the colonizing Dutch, declaring freedom in August 1945.
“I am a third generation Indonesian born in Sukabumi. My grandparents had been here since the early 19th century,” says Van der Sterren who grew up in West Java’s great green tea growing country, the warmth of that green resonant today in his paintings.
“One grandparent was in the Royal Dutch Armey, another was a civil engineer who built the swimming pool in Bandung, Pemandian Cihampelas, that was recently demolished to make way for an apartment building,” says Van der Sterren, saddened at the loss of a Bandung icon.
As a four-year-old during the early months of the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, Van der Sterren remembers being classified as Eurasian because he was born in the country.
“I was four when my family was caught by the Japanese. They had a funny rule that people born in Holland were Dutch and we born here were Eurasian, but there were so many blonde, blue-eyed Indonesians then they had to change that ruling and said all people of Dutch extraction had to go into concentration camps. The first camp at Cihapit where I was for about a year with my Mum was not quite so bad. It was a part of the city walled off with bamboo and it was really like a whole economy to itself in a confined space. The next camp was in Ambarawa called Kamp Banyu Biru, the blue lake camp. That was a terrible camp in an old condemned Dutch barracks. I don’t really want to talk about that period – it’s time that’s gone by,” says Van der Sterren, clearly marked by the rapid and reverberating changes that were taking place in his young life.
It was with relief that the family, who apart from his grandfather all survived World War II, were sent to New Zealand to recuperate at the close of one of the greatest wars waged across the globe.
“After two and half years in the camps we were sent to New Zealand to recuperate. The people there were wonderful, but my father, a tea plantation manager, was told we had to move back to Indonesia, to Jakarta. But the Japanese had destroyed the estate so my father worked with an airline,” says Van der Sterren of his family’s rootless wanderings in the aftermath of war and the birth of Indonesia as an independent nation.
A short return to Holland didn’t sit well. “We were not from there – it was not our home. It was a difficult time. We had made so many friends in New Zealand so we decided to move there,” says Van der Sterren who later took up sculpture, but found this medium of expression was not a fit.
“I began to study music, but that was also not for me and then I met the famous New Zealand painter Cedric Savage – that was in 1957. He started me in oils – I had always sketched, stage-managed productions; I had always been in the arts. In the old days I would paint outdoors, now I do charcoals on site and these inspire me when I paint. For me drawing is the essence,” says Van der Sterren who since the late 1980s traveled the globe until the mid 90s when he came full circle and again found his home in Indonesia.
And it is in his exhibition at Bridges Bali that we see through his works these journeys into memory and the artist’s boundless joy in answering Indonesia’s magic attraction, where the green is warmer.
When asked the difference between painting panoramas of his much loved adopted home, New Zealand and those of his birth country, Indonesia, he explains it is the colors within the green. “New Zealand are black greens, here in Indonesia they are warmer.”
“Colorful Horizons – building bridges between people in Bali” opened on October 15 and runs until January 15. Exhibition space has been donated by Bridges Bali in support of the John Fawcett Foundation and proceeds from art sales also support the foundation.
