Desak Suarti is Bali's first modern female artist

Desak Suarti is Bali's first modern female artist

 

Desak Suarti is Bali's first modern female artist, as well as one of the island's bestdancers. She has held one-woman showings in Bali and Singapore. Her paintings have been exhibited in several galleries in and around the City of New York.

DESAK SUARTI comes from a family with generations of outstanding dancers and painters. Suarti began studying dance with her famous grandmother at the age of five but painting was closed to her because this art was reserve tonally for men, and her father refused to teach her. Each day, Suarti sat at her father's side, sharpening his bamboo pens and mixing the Chinese ink for his sketches. Suarti's artistic feeling for painting grew and grew and could not be held back. She secretly studied her father's style. Climbing inside the rafters of her thatched roof house, she painted in hiding. One day she surprised her father with a group of her water colors. He never thought a woman could paint, he admitted. He was so pleased and so proud of her work that he gladly taught and encouraged her from then on to paint seriously.

Suarti describes her work: 

"I use water colors and acrylics on canvas, painting traditional themes about daily life - dancing, farming and episodes from our Hindu stories like the Ramayana. The Balinese painting technique is painstaking and detailed. I often spend months completing a single canvas." Suarti is currently designing sets for a planned staging of the Ramayana epic.

Source: Suarti Document