Affandi (1907 – May 23, 1990) was an Indonesian artist. Born in Cirebon, West Java
In the 1950s, Affandi began to create expressionist paintings. The piece Carrying the First Grandchild (1953) marked his newfound style known as "squeezing the tube". Affandi painted by directly squeezing the paint out of its tube. He came across this technique by accident, when he intended to draw a line one day. As he lost his patience when he was looking for a missing pencil, he applied the paint directly from its tube. The resulting effect, as he found out, was that the painted object appeared more alive. He also felt more freedom to express his feelings when he used his own hands, instead of a paint brush. In certain respects, he has acknowledged similarities with Vincent van Gogh.
In the 1950s, Affandi began to create expressionist paintings. The piece Carrying the First Grandchild (1953) marked his newfound style known as "squeezing the tube". Affandi painted by directly squeezing the paint out of its tube. He came across this technique by accident, when he intended to draw a line one day. As he lost his patience when he was looking for a missing pencil, he applied the paint directly from its tube. The resulting effect, as he found out, was that the painted object appeared more alive. He also felt more freedom to express his feelings when he used his own hands, instead of a paint brush. In certain respects, he has acknowledged similarities with Vincent van Gogh.
Like most of his Indonesian contemporaries, Affandi grew up largely cut off from the mainstream of modern art. It wasn't until the late 1930s that the first exhibitions of major Western artists – from Gauguin to Kandinsky and Picasso – were held in Batavia (today’s Jakarta). Affandi was particularly fascinated by the Javanese wayang, or shadow-play. He followed his family to Bandung and then to Batavia, honing his skill at drawing and then at oil-painting. By the time he began painting seriously, in 1940, he had at various times been a housepainter, a cinema ticket-collector, and a billboard artist. He would save paints left over from the posters and his other jobs and paint landscapes. Soon he was exhibiting – and, as a surprise to himself – actually selling. With his wife’s consent, he decided to devote the first ten days of each month to his trade, and the remaining twenty to his art.
His only teachers were a few reproductions that he saw in copies of Studio, an art magazine from London. He felt a kinship with the Impressionists, with Goya and with Edvard Munch, as well as the earlier masters, Breughel[disambiguation needed], Hieronymus Bosch and Botticelli. Their influence began to show in his paintings. But the grim realities around Affandi made an even greater mark on him. In Yogjakarta one day, just after the Pacific War, Affandi sat painting a market place where folk were grubbing about, half-starved and half-naked. Infuriated at his seeming unconcern, a youth threw dust at the artist and his canvas, shouting: "This man is mad! While our people are naked he paints them on canvas and makes a bad painting we cannot understand.Wikipedia
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