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Line master Lempad revisited
Illuminated Line: The beauty of Lempadâs line is seen in this Kecak drawing on display at the Lempad retrospective at Puri Lukisan in Ubud
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span class="inline inline-center">Illuminated Line: The beauty of Lempad's line is seen in this Kecak drawing on display at the Lempad retrospective at Puri Lukisan in Ubud.
Just meters from the chaotic and congested crossroads of Ubud's main streets, a small wooden sign is almost lost amid the tourist town's bright lights.
The sign announces the home of legendary Balinese artist, I Gusti Nyoman Lempad ' who died in 1978 aged 116 years ' says his eldest grandson Gusti Putu Gede.
For nigh on a century, the Lempads have lived in this family compound that until so very recently fronted a dirt road and a small local market with the Ubud Palace next door.
Over the decades, Lempad's extraordinary line drawings and sculptures have drawn the rich and famous to this humble abode, including Margaret Mead and Ronald E. Evans, a crew-cut sporting astronaut fresh from the moon.
With the current Lempad retrospective of works gathered from collections across the globe running at Ubud's Puri Lukisan Museum a new generation of guests can be expected.
The only grandson of Lempad, who grew up to become an artist, Gusti Nyoman Sudara, remembers well the day in 1976 when Evans came to meet the world-renowned artist. Evans, the command module pilot for Apollo 17, spent more than six days in orbit around the Moon, most of it alone.
'I was sitting with my grandfather when a man with this strange spiky hair came in. Grandfather showed him a drawing of the Moon Queen. The man said he had been to the moon. Grandpa said he had too, but he got there earlier. The drawing was proof,' says the 67-year-old Sudara, surrounded by the drawing his grandfather asked him to keep creating.
'These are the concepts of Lempad, but they are my drawings,' he says. 'I had a request from Lempad to keep on drawing his concepts so we as a family would never lose his ideas. I was still very young, at school, when Grandfather said this to me,' says Sudara, who learned to draw from the master by watching him from shadowy nooks.
He recalls that when he was a child he was a very naughty one.
'I didn't sleep like the other grandkids. There were eight of us. Now, Lempad only drew at night so he could work without us grandkids annoying him. He concentrated so deeply I could sneak over to where he was working and sit very quietly and watch,' says Sudara, who became the only grandchild to be taught by the renowned artist.
Sometimes he'd make a noise, get caught and then Lempad would tell him stories.
'I think Grandpa saw I had this in my blood so he taught me to draw. His father was an artist, too. My grandkids are now learning from me, but like Lempad I only work at night,' chuckles Sudara. 'Also because of the grandkids.'
The Lempad retrospective has drawn together works of the master not seen in Bali since before the World War II.
Curtained off from the main exhibition is a collection of Lempad's erotic drawings, commissioned by westerners from as early as the 1930s, according to interpretive information.
Sudara explains these may well have been created by Lempad after westerners had seen his works in process.
Astronaut gift: Grandson of Lempad, I Gusti Nyoman Sudara, shows a copy of a Moon Goddess drawing given to an American astronaut by Lempad in the early 1970's.
'He always drew the figures naked and then dressed them. In this way he could be sure the anatomy was correct. I still draw in this same way and I think westerners thought he was drawing nudes and that's what they commissioned,' says Sudara, adding that Lempad spent hours and days developing his concepts for each drawing.
During the day, he says, his grandfather cleaned the yard and weeded the garden and he was always smoothing the earth floor of the yard. This was his rest from drawing, but he found through this work the time to think.
'He was once inspired by the rain. He watched the way it dripped and ran across the yard. From this he developed the thick to thin line that you see as a color depth gradation. I learned that technique from him,' says Sudara.
Lempad was training his grandson in fine art well into his 90s.
'He painted from concept and his last concept was the long, thin wayang drawings that he developed in his 90s. By the time he was 100 years old he was sitting and resting a lot,' says Sudara, who lives a few kilometers from Lempad's Ubud family compound, which is now headed by his eldest grandson, 74-year-old Gusti Putu Gede.
The brothers have quite different recollections of their famous grandfather. Gede was an honored guest at the Lempad retrospective opening last Saturday, receiving a copy of Lempad of Bali: The Illuminating Line, a limited edition 424-page catalog 'raisonne' that took a team of authors and researchers eight years to develop. Sudara, on the other hand, stayed home to draw.
'Yes, I saw Lempad drawing when I was a child, but later I was in the army so I was not home that often. But as a kid I felt happy watching him draw because he guided us grandchildren on how our lives could be better, but he never taught us,' says Gede, seated on a woven mat in Lempad's studio-cum-cottage.
'Because if he had an inspiration, he would just draw and, to him, we were not there. He just got inspired any time, night or day, and he drew ['¦] In the end this was where he slept and rested. He was by then very old. He died at 116 years of age,' says Gede, surrounded by Lempad's drawings, some of which are suffering the ravages of time and the tropics.
' Photos by JB Djwan
