About ARIE SMIT | Earthly Evocations at Sin Sin Fine Art

Arie Smit (Adrianus Wilhelmus Smit), was born in 1916 in Zaandam, the Netherlands. He currently lives near Ubud, Bali. Heir to his family’s business empire, Smit preferred to enrol at in the Academy of Arts in Rotterdam to study painting. While there, Smit befriended a classmate from the ‘Dutch Indies’ (as Indonesia was then known), whose talk of ‘the tropical forests, striped tigers, lakes, and mountains’ inspired him to join the army at the age of 18 for the opportunity to travel to the Dutch Indies. In 1938 he arrived in Jakarta (then Batavia) and was assigned to sketch for the Topographical service, a job involving exploration of the island by bicycle. During the Japanese invasion Smit was made a prisoner of war and sent for forced labour in Thailand, returning to Indonesia after the war ended in 1945, and gaining Indonesia citizenship after Independence in 1949. He taught painting at the Bandung Institute of Technology before finally settling in Bali in 1956, where he has lived and painted ever since. Like other Bali-based European artists, such as Walter Spies and Rudolf Bonnet, Smit both influenced and was influenced by the Balinese painting tradition.

Smit’s personal mission was the creation of a painting vocabulary of light and colour that would capture the vivid beauty of the Balinese landscape and the quality of the sunlight reflecting its brilliance. The faux-naif quality of Smit’s renderings belies the evolved sophistication of his painterly language. His style fuses a kind of fauvist exuberance in his approach to colour with an almost expressionistic rhythmic quality in the forms. As a teacher, Smit nurtured a group of local landscape artists whose style became known as the ‘Young Artists Style’. Astonishingly, Smit was painting actively up until last year, and his recent works demonstrate that, very subtly, his language has continued to evolve, particularly in his colour sense. In many of these works, there is a wonderful play with red tonalities, infusing purple, rose, blue and cinnamon colours with a curious, warm light. Somehow it seems relevant to Arie Smit’s statement that ‘Art is a kind of loving, a wish to communicate with the viewer.

A Temple Court Yard | Acrylic on Canvas | 40 x 30 cm | Arie Smit©2011

Evening in Bali | Acrylic on Canvas | 30 x 40 cm | Arie Smit©2005

Landscape | Acrylic on Canvas | 31 x 41 cm | Arie Smit©2006

Puding Rice in The Village | Acrylic on Canvas | 27x37 cm | Arie Smit©2004

Returning Home | Acrylic on Canvas | 60x70 cm | Arie Smit©2009

Sanur: Early Morning Low Tide | Acrylic on Canvas | 40x53 cm | Arie Smit©2011

	Earthly Evocations: Indonesian Art Now 17 May - 17 June 2012
	Curatorial Notes \| The Artists