FROM LEFT: Wayan
at work in the I
Wayan Gama Art
School, Keliki;
Wayan working on
an intricate Keliki-
style drawing116 nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel
BALIwalled houses. I balance precariously pillion,
oversized hotel umbrella lailing madly in
one hand, feeling quite the colonial clown; a
sight Bali is surely well accustomed to.
Long before Eat Pray Love turned this
Indonesian island into a set-jetting circus
of spirituality, Europeans were making
pilgrimages to Bali in the 1920s and 1930s.
They were drawn in by its Eastern promise of
tiered rice paddies, rustic villages and visual
arts that narrated a heady blend of Hindu,
Buddhist and ancient animist lore.
Invited by Balinese royals, such artist-
patrons as Dutchman Rudolf Bonnet and
German Walter Spies put the jungly uplands
of Ubud on the map as an oasis of art,
shiting themes from religious to everyday
subjects, albeit with a irm Orientalist focus.
I ind one of Bonnet’s distinctive paintings
— a sensual portrait from 1936 of a Balinese
king, semi-dressed in ceremonial garb
— not in an art gallery, but displayed on the
walls of a hotel set among banana leaves and
sandalwood trees in the rainforest just north
of Sayan.
A small collection of 1930s Balinese art,
part of the eccentric creative vision of hotel
designer Bill Bensley and local hotelier-
art collector Suwito Gunawan, adorns the
canvas walls of Capella Ubud luxury tented
jungle camp. Not a tree was felled for this
new higgledy-piggledy hillside construction,
where rocky Flintstones-esque plunge pools
hover over the Ayung River’s vast gorge. The
mix-not-match aesthetic combines loral
Cath Kidston-style interiors with campaign
furniture, loos designed like carved wooden
thrones and shiny brass monkeys perched incheeky poses on tent apexes. The restaurant’s
show-stopping ceiling’s huge, hand-painted
frieze depicts stories from the Hindu epics,
and overlooks a pool that resembles a giant
tin bath.
Surrounded by such a visual cocktail it’s
a wonder anyone notices Bonnet’s work
lurking in a lounge behind reception. But
Bali doesn’t lack prominent art galleries.
Palatial institutions populate both Ubud
and its surrounding jungly reaches, where
I ind more of Bonnet’s work, including his
signature, romanticised portraits of noble
peasants and ceremonial dancers, in the
venerable Neka, Agung Rai and Puri Lukisan
museums. The latter was founded by Bonnet
himself at the behest of a local prince; all
ofer a compelling crash-course in the history
of Balinese arts — from the highly detailed
Kamasan paintings of the 16th century, richly
interlaced with winged monkey gods and
handsome elephants, to the modern, rounded
nudes of I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, Bali’s
native modernist maestro.Out of the frame
Balinese art also thrives beyond museum
walls. I follow a sky-scraping mountain ridge
just north of Capella, passing pendulous
ceremonial penjor (decorative bamboo poles)
nodding girafe-like in the breeze. They
signal it’s wedding season, according to Bali’s
210-day Pawukon calendar.
Arriving at Keliki village, I adjust my focus
from the towering to the tiny. Hunched over
a table, in the open-fronted pavilion of the
I Wayan Gama Art School, ebony blocks
of Chinese ink to hand, three young boys