Artist Timi Waworuntu taps into Ancestral Roots
My mother, now 92 still going strong, a society beauty in her day, following presentation gained the reputation of being a “bit of a bolter” having gone from RADA to actually appearing on the West End stage, having left several husbands, not to mention a number broken engagements. The happiest period of my childhood by far, was a blissful period of Boho life in 1950’s Chelsea demi-monde between the ages of 9 to 12 when my mother, having left my father was reduced to living in straitened circs in the basement flat of a large house in Milner Street owned by her best girlfriend from school, an accomplished painter.
How much my mother enjoyed la vie bohème in relative poverty I don’t know, but for me it was paradise, the huge house was always full of interesting people who spoiled me rotten. When my stepfather came a-wooing, mad, bad Black Campbell, a man I came to loathe, and whom she left a decade later, to my eternal sorrow my idyll came to an abrupt end.
I was packed off to boarding school and miserably solitary holidays in splendid isolation in deepest Dorset. In compensation I became very horsey indeed. Not social “horsey”, mind you. No, I took up steeplechasing with Lermontovian gusto and ran with the racing set. I didn’t get back to London until the mid 60’s, the enforced rustication during formative years having irreversibly skewed my future development and any gregarious creativity I may have possessed toward the more solitary and mental process of the writer as observer.
Having been the victim of boho interruptus as paradise lost I was therefore intrigued by certain parallels with someone whose own childhood and adolescence had actually run full course and to stir myself to visit the opening of Timi Waworunto’s exhibition of latest works at the Danes Art Veranda earlier this month, and which runs until 6th September. I was glad I did and you should make the effort too.
Timi Waworuntu (53) born 1955 is the second son, one of five children 3 boys 2 girls, born to Judith and Wija Waworuntu and mainly raised in Sanur where his parents built a small and idyllic home and guesthouse on the beach in 1963 at the suggestion of art dealer Jimmy Pandy, who like Wija also hailed from Manado.
Called the Tanjung Sari, the hotel was progressively enlarged, becoming the celebrated prototype for the tropical beach boutique hotel worldwide. Wija went on to create a garden estate at Batujimbar in collaboration with Australian artist Donald Friend and Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa, among others. For two decades the Tanjung Sari and Batujimbar were awash with artists, writers, collectors and all manner of famous and interesting people, plus a colourful cast of hangers on.
Whatever else it was, it was an altogether wonderful creative compost in which to raise children and all of the children have reacted to this childhood stimulation developing their own individual creative response. Timi’s mother was herself a talented and varied artist who, in addition to passing on her artistic talent to her son, continued to foster and encourage him to pursue his painting seriously until her death in Italy last year. With such a background and brought up in such a community, mixing on a daily basis with important painters like Donald Friend and Theo Meier, it is hardly surprising Timi developed a highly developed visual sense and an abiding passion for light and colour.
Over the past 25 years Timi has never stopped honing his art and vision through the twists and turns of coming to maturity, both as man and artist. From the late 70’s onward he has had solo exhibitions in Jakarta as well as elsewhere in Asia, along with joint exhibitions with other artists, including his mother. He has also travelled to Australia, Paris and Florence, where he studied art with various artists and institutions and where his paintings are exhibited.
In 1996, feeling an ancestral call, he returned to his father’s family birthplace in North Sulawesi to open a gallery in Tomohon, which he did with the artist Sony Lengkong. He says that this was like opening a door into Nature and the infusion of intuition into his work, which was to have a profound effect.
The current exhibition of 15 paintings over the past two years is the culmination of this epiphany. The works which can be described as abstract expressionist possess a quiet and subtle power. The technique is confident and the works are those of an artist coming into maturity and on the brink of new insights, which will bring him to a yet fuller and stronger expression of his art. Timi now describes his work as being inspired by Nature, which is at the core of all he does. His approach to the numinosity of this world is via meditation and the interior world that is revealed in its contemplation. “For me, it is a conversation with God”, he says very simply. “My job is to put it on canvas”.
With this exhibition Timi Waworunto has clearly become a painter whose work is worthy of serious consideration and whose best work lies ahead of him. Collector’s take note.
“The Sun is Still Afar”
An Exhibition of the recent works of
Timi Waworuntu is at the:
Danes Art Veranda until 6th Sept, 2008.
Jl. Hayam Wuruk 159, Denpasar.
