The Oriental woman is bound by tradition. Her life centres on the kitchen, and she is not prone to rebelling against the power men hold over her. Well... so goes the stereotype.

But there is at least one Balinese woman who challenges this stereotype. This woman's name is Murni. At first glance, Murni looks like a typical Balinese village woman. But she favours a profession as a painter - an unusual choice for a Balinese woman - over spending her life in the kitchen or other such traditional women's domains'. If Balinese women are known for an artistic endeavour, it is generally for dancing, not painting. But Murni is a league apart.

This is in spite of the fact that Murni, who was born in Tabanan on May 21 1966, is not descended from a family of painters, which is usually how Balinese painters learn their craft. In fact, there is nothing at all artistic about Murni's family - neither her mother, her father, her grandmother nor her grandfather were artists. And neither did her family ever encourage her to become a painter. For generations, they have been farmers: planting rice and tilling the soil. Murni's desire to paint is purely instinctive.

This is not to suggest that Murni has had no mentors. And in her formative years as a painter, Dew Putu Mokoh was the most important of them. Born in 1934 in Pengosekan, near Ubud, Mokoh's unique style draws strongly on the world of Balinese shadow puppetry. Mokoh, who has exhibited in Australia, USA, Holland, Denmark, Italy, Germany and Japan, was Murni's first guru, and instilled in her a solid mastery of the Pengosekan-school technique. Her subsequent proficiency and success can therefore be partly attributed to him. But for the most part, it results from the richness of her own intellectual wanderings. Like most painters, it is her soul-searching attempts to know herself that motivate her and inspire her in her work. No art school molded this woman's style.

But before beginning to paint seriously at 22, Murni - whose full name is I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih - was busy sketching the black picture of her life, as the childhood and early adulthood of this dark-skinned woman could be described. Growing up in a poor farming family, Murni was forced to drop out of school after her first year at junior high - not a level of education that these days would be considered to 'get one anywhere'.

It certainly isn't much fun being poor. When Murni was born, her parents had been farming the same tiny plot of land for years, and they weren't getting any better off. "When he heard of the government-sponsored transmigration program, (which, in the name of alleviating overpopulation, allocated poor Balinese and Javanese farming families with new plots of land to cultivate wet rice in the archipelago's Outer Islands, ed.), my father immediately registered his interest. Pretty soon, we found ourselves bound for Sulawesi," recalls Murni rather dismally. It was only by moving to Sulawesi, reasoned Murni's parents, that they would ever get a chance to improve their economic welfare.

Murni's parents were forced to sell their rice paddy, their house and the land on which it stood in order to raise the funds to 'transmigrate'. Drastic measures indeed in Bali, where continued access to one's birthplace is of utmost spiritual and religious significance. That Murni's family gave it up, therefore, attests to the severity of their condition, a condition Murni refers to as "her family's fate, which she had no choice but to follow."

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above :
"Murni in her Ubud Studio"