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The Star Online: Lifestyle: Arts & Fashion

Posted: 04 Dec 2011 03:28 AM PST

A lifelong love for art has taken this artist far in life.

IF he had followed the path his father had in mind for him, Raja Azhar Idris, 59, would probably have become the proprietor of a modest soy sauce factory in Perak. But when he was 18, he sold his first paintings for RM1.50 each, and came back with RM50 to show his father – and his fate as an artist was sealed.

He painted on paper, and also on little wooden blocks that people would use as pendants and key chains. "No one knows that the wooden souvenir key chains that you see in Central Market were my invention!" he says in an interview at Yayasan Seni Berdaftar in Kuala Lumpur recently. "I sold so many of those that my father started helping me chop the trees in my backyard for material."

In fact, his little artistic endeavour was so successful his father soon gave up his soy sauce business to help his son full time, as the young man began hawking his wares around the state, in Ipoh, Taiping and Kuala Kangsar.

A year later, barely 20, he decided to go to the big city, KL, to find his place as an artist. He took the train and arrived with nothing but a bagful of art and the address of one of his father's former employees with whom he would stay.

"You could call it fate, because when I got off the train, I ran into a customs officer called Jimmy Orlando. He asked me what I was doing in KL, and I told him I was an artist and I needed to go to this address in Kampung Baru. Turns out Jimmy was an artist too!

"After he took me to my host's house, he introduced me to an area called Benting, across the riverbank from where the Kuala Lumpur Mosque is, which had a night bazaar and all kinds of street vendors selling their things," recalls Raja Azhar.

And so the young artist started setting up a stall there every night, painting and selling what he painted straight away. He made around RM50 every night. Sometimes the municipal council officers would raid the area, looking for vendors without permits, and Raja Azhar would fold up his wares when the warning sounded and wait for the raid to be over.

During the day, he would take his work around to stores on Chow Kit Road. He found a place along Jalan Ampang, where Standard Chartered Bank used to be located, and hung up his paintings on the big trees there to sell.

"I knew a lot of bank directors and business owners would walk past that road to go to the bank, so it was a good place to let my paintings be seen. All I knew was to survive; to produce paintings to sell. I painted every day to keep up with the demand!" he says.

He calls that period the best time of his life. With his earnings, he could afford a place of his own. Along the way, he managed to secure a municipal stall outside the famed Coliseum, and there he caught the tourists and the late night movie-going crowd. Raja Azhar never tired of the artist's life, hard though it was. In 1976, he decided to do his first show. He approached Merlin Hotel, now Concorde Hotel, and they sponsored his first show. Amazingly for such a young artist, he had a collector from Paris buying up half of his paintings and he was invited to exhibit in Paris.

Ever on a quest to improve himself, the young artist enrolled in a personal development course by Datuk Lawrence Chan. Following that, he sold over 50 pieces of his work to Holiday Inn, and secured a commission from the Goodyear Tyre Co. It was full steam ahead from then on. He went to Melbourne, Australia, with his friend, fellow artist Khalil Ibrahim, who was doing a show there. He spent nine months there, the maximum he was allowed to on a visitor's visa. During that time, he painted non-stop to fulfil orders. He realised he had a market in Melbourne, and the only way he could stay there longer than his visa allowed was if he enrolled to study.

Demonstrating the confident can-do attitude that had taken him so far in life already, he interviewed at the Victorian College of the Arts, the most prestigious art college in the country then – and got in. With a three-year fine arts degree under his belt by 1979, the self-taught artist vastly increased his knowledge about his craft.

During this time, he won the St Kilda Art Prize and the Lord Mayor of Melbourne Artist of the Year and The Victorian Artists's Society Artist of the Year titles. Unsurprisingly, Raja Azhar stayed on in Australia for 14 years, and in the last seven years, owned a successful art gallery called the Raja Idris Gallery.

In 1992, he decided to return to Malaysia, and opened his first gallery here called Art Case Gallery at The Crown Princess Hotel in KL. The gallery has since moved to the Great Eastern Mall. "The 20th anniversary of my gallery is coming up," he says with pride.

With such success behind him, you would think that, like many senior artists, he would be more of a manager rather than a hands-on artist nowadays. But Raja Azhar still paints every day. His style is "impressionism with movement", he says, but he has also ventured into sculpture and glasswork. He is also an avid conservator and restorer of art, something he practised while he was in Australia.

"When I finished my fine arts degree, I initially wanted to pursue postgraduate studies," says Raja Azhar. "But I realised an artist's best credentials hang on his walls. You can have the best qualifications in the world, but your work is your best calling card. So I continue to produce art. It's my passion and my life."

He still finds time to curate most of the shows at Art Case as well as exhibitions at other galleries. The latest one is the Rupa Dan Suara (Look And Voice) exhibition that begins today at Yayasan Seni Berdaftar. "It is called thus because 'Rupa' represents the art that you see, and 'Suara' represents the poetry reading that accompanies the artwork," he says.

Along with Raja Azhar himself, who is showing four pieces of sculpture and glasswork, the other artists involved in the show are Anne Samat, Bhanu Achan, Izwan Hilmi, Ng Foo Cheong, Norizan Muslim, Raja Shahriman, Ramli Rahmat, Rosli Zakaria, and Zulkafal Ali. The poet readers are Abdul Ghafar Ibrahim, Ibrahim Ghaffar, Lim Swee Tin, Raja Rajeswari, Sanisudin, Suton Umar R.S., Ramli Rahmat, Rosli Zakaria, and Zulkafal Ali.

■ The Rupa Dan Suara exhibition continues until Dec 18 at Yayasan Seni Berdaftar, No.333, Persiaran Ritchie, Off Jalan Ampang, Kuala Lumpur. The foundation is open Mondays to Fridays from 9am to 9pm; Saturdays, 9am to 1pm; it is closed on Sundays.

■ Art Case Gallery is at Lot 7, Level 4, Great Eastern Mall, No. 303, Jalan Ampang, Kuala Lumpur. For more information, e-mail info@artcase.com.my or % 019-311 8804.

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‘Afloat’ again

Posted: 04 Dec 2011 02:16 AM PST

Artifacts, replicas and reconstructions are on show at a display that leads up to the 100th anniversary of the Titanic tragedy.

YOU jump, I jump." This memorable quote from the 1997 hit movie, Titanic, tends to overshadow the real tragedy of the sinking of the RMS Titanic nearly a hundred years ago.

It's not surprising that romantic versions of events and personalities often hold sway. But Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition at the ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, is a solemn presentation of historical truths with its display of 275 selected items recovered from the shipwreck.

Replica reconstructions, like those of the grand staircase, the first and third class cabins, the verandah café and the boiler room, do create an ambient mood that takes viewers back in time, although it's nothing as spectacular or dramatic as the re-creation of the sinking in the James Cameron movie.

The actual artifacts, however, are more mundane. Objects like a giant wrench, suitcases, mailbags, cupboards, trinkets, bric a brac, personal effects, vials of perfume samples, a porcelain set etched with the logo of the White Star Line, sheet music, menus, postage stamps and currency notes are on display, as are a gimbal (pendulum) lamp, a gold pocket watch and a diamond ring.

These were among the more than 5,500 items owned by RMS Titanic Inc, which recovered them from the seabed some 3,800m below the North Atlantic ocean's surface after the wreck was discovered 741km south-east of Newfoundland on Sept 1, 1985.

The Titanic, under the helm of Captain Edward J. Smith, had set sail from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912. It stopped to pick up more passengers in Cherbourg (France) and Queenstown (now known as Cobh, Ireland) before barrelling towards New York with 2,224 people on board.

Some 1,513 lives were lost when the ship struck an iceberg four days later. It sank at 2.20am on April 15, two hours and 40 minutes after the crash. Some 711 people survived, excluding one who died on the rescue boat Carpathia. (Source: British Parliament report, 1912.)

Every visitor to the Titanic exhibition is given a boarding pass picked randomly from the original passenger manifest. Mine had the name Major Archibald Willingham Butt, a US presidential military aide and former journalist. He was among the 125 first-class passengers who perished in the tragedy.

The passenger list included millionaire John Jacob Astor IV and his wife; industrialist Benjamin Guggenheim and his mistress; owner of the Macy chain of department stores Isidor Straus and wife Ida; and millionairess Margaret "Molly" Brown, better known as the "Unsinkable Molly Brown".

Millvina Dean was two months old at the time of the tragedy. She died on May 31, 2009, at 97, the last of the Titanic's survivors.

In times of crises, heroes are born. One such was Guggenheim, 46, who boarded the ship at Cherbourg (with his mistress, the singer Leontine Aubart). He was said to have helped many into the lifeboats and reportedly said: "We are dressed in our best and prepared to go down like gentlemen."

Another hero, Ida Straus, preferred to stick to her husband Isidor, saying: "As we have lived, so we will die: together" – certainly more moving than the Leonardo DiCaprio-Kate Winslet celluloid love story.

One passenger, Marion Meanwell, was to have travelled on the Majestic, Titanic's sister ship, but was transferred to the Titanic instead because of a coal strike. She did not survive. Another, Howard Irwin, was saved because he had been kidnapped and detained on land, although his bags were on board. Banker J.P. Morgan cancelled his trip at the last minute.

The privileges and luxurious setting of the first class cabin contrasted sharply with those in the third class cabins, which had four spartan bunk beds within a cramped space.

First-class passengers paid US$2,500 (about US$57,200 or RM177,320 today) while third-class "steerage" passengers paid US$40 (about US$900 or RM2,790 today). There were two suites on the B Deck which cost US$4,500 (about US$103,000 or RM333,300 today) each!

The social chasm was great. First class came with amenities such as a Turkish bath, hot and cold water, a gymnasium with a trunk-rotating machine called an electric camel and, yes, even a squash court.

The settings were opulence personified – carved mahogany panelling or French walnut wood; mother-of-pearl inlay; stained glass windows; a 2m-high bronze, arched window, and a chandelier in the rotunda of the 8m-high grand staircase with a bronze cherub.

Third-class passengers had no access to the upper decks and had to put up with the constant trundling noises from the boiler room.

But the best simulation is perhaps the darkened Discovery Gallery, as the transparent floorboards reveal crockery embedded in the "seabed" while a giant screen plays out multiple scenes, some somewhat eerie, of the wreck.

Altogether nine galleries have been created in the 2,500sq m lower level of the museum and they include a 1912 "timeline" capsule which shows life at that time.

The Titanic carried 16 lifeboats, plus four collapsible canvas lifeboats, which were enough for only 1,178 people. More men died because of the "women and children first" policy; 20% of the men on board survived compared to nearly 75% of the women.

All the children in the first and second classes survived; it was probably because they were fewer in numbers. Only 34.18%, or 27 out of 79, of the children in the third-class made it to Pier 54 in New York. Two lucky dogs also survived.

While the bodies of the first-class casualties were recovered, presumably to facilitate inheritance disputes, those from the third class were left buried at sea.

The exhibition also plays silent tribute to the "Black Gang", the boiler-room boys charged with shovelling coal to keep the Titanic going and on course. The ship, which used an average of 850 tonnes of coal a day, was loaded with 5,892 tonnes of coal, or 89% of capacity, which was deemed enough for the voyage.

■ Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition is on at the ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, until April 29, 2012, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the ocean liner on April 15, 1912.

■ A voyage tracing the Titanic's route, culminating in a stopover at the site of the disaster, will also mark the centenary, as well as an April 6 re-release of James Cameron's box-office epic, Titanic, this time in 3D.

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Kredit: www.thestar.com.my

Ahad, 4 Disember 2011