The Not So “Young Artist”

Almost twenty years ago, a client gifted me a canvas painting of the Hindu goddess Saraswati. She purchased the painting in Bali decades earlier. I constructed a rudimentary frame and hung the painting in our home. I hadn’t thought much about Bali, even during our year of travel. It wasn’t on our list when we traveled for twelve months in 2018. But in 2020, while on a three-month trip to South Asia, we finally got to Bali. I took a photo with my phone of the Saraswati painting in order to learn more about it when we were in Bali. There is a lot of artwork, museums, and artists in the Ubud area of Bali. One day, I was in an artist’s studio at the north end of the Campuhan Ridge trail; I showed him the photo of the Saraswati painting and asked if he could tell me more about it. He took a quick look and told me yes, he did know all about the painting and its sale and history. He shared that it was the “Young Artist Style” and was not popular anymore. I asked if he had any young artist style paintings that he had done, and he replied yes, but that the style was not popular anymore. Buried in the back of his shop, he uncovered dozens of his young artist style paintings, and we poured through dozens of them, eventually purchasing two pieces. We brought them back with us, had them framed, and they currently hang in our home. They’re a nice reminder of our time in Bali in 2020.

April 2025 is our fourth trip to Bali. It’s turned out to be one of our favorite places to travel and hang out. The place we stay is called Penestanan, a small village just outside of Ubud, where daily life still focuses on devotion, ritual, and daily offerings. There’s an outdoor temple in every home; most have two. We stay in the same bungalow and rent from the same family. There’s a network of narrow walkways, some through rice fields, where you can find superb yoga classes, a tea temple, top-notch vegetarian and vegan food, a nice supermarket, amazing coffee, and some of the friendliest and happiest people you’ll ever meet, all within walking distance of the bungalow. It’s safe, quiet, and affordable.

Hanging out and walking around the area over the past five years when we’re here, I’ve crossed paths with a certain old man many times, who walks up into the neighborhood to his artist studio, just a minute’s walk from our bungalow. The striking thing is he does not ride a motorbike like most people in Bali – he walks. Many times on our way to yoga or lunch, we pass by his studio where he sits quietly, surrounded by his paintings. I’ve said hi many times and gotten to know his name – I Wayan Pugur (pronounced ee-why-ahn-puh-gur). He is an artist in the Young Artist Style, the style that’s not popular anymore. I’ve never seen anyone in his shop, and he seems genuinely happy every time I see him.

Yesterday something prompted me to visit him. That something is what I’ve been referring to as the Magic of Bali, or more specifically the Magic of Penestanan. I grabbed my phone and walked over to his shop. I asked if I could visit and interview him. He obliged. Here is his story.

I Wayan Pugur is eighty years old. His English is really good as he jokes that he’s a not-so-young artist anymore. He has hundreds of wonderfully colorful paintings for sale in his studio. He started painting in his teens in the early sixties at the urging of a Dutch born Indonesian artist Arie Smit, who was living in Bali.

At the time, there was a severe food shortage in Penestanan due to a volcanic eruption. Smit began to teach young teenagers to paint and earn money from selling the paintings to the tourists who were starting to come to Bali in the sixties and seventies. At first, Smit considered Wayan to have no natural talent for painting, but with hard work and determination, he quickly developed his skills, becoming one of the best Young Artist Style painters in Penestanan.

Wayan has a wife and four children and has never held another job other than being an artist. At eighty years old he still walks to work seven days a week, forgoing motorbikes and bicycles. And he still paints.

He proudly shares a book with me that showed his artwork being displayed in the National Museum in Singapore in 1971. He is smiling ear to ear.

He also produces a photo of what the area here looked like fifty years ago – all rice fields as far as you could see. Now everything is homes, villas, bungalows, tourists and businesses.

Our interview lasted about twenty minutes. I was full of joy spending that short time with him, learning about his life’s work and of the Young Artist Style painting and about the history of Penestanan area where we’ve visited over the past five years.

When I returned back to the bungalow to do some googling about Young Artist Style painting I came across this on Wikipedia. I Wayan Pugur, the man I had just interviewed, is mentioned in this wikipedia section of Balinese art. What a humble and interesting man. He laughingly refers to himself as the “not-so-young-artist anymore”. But at eighty years old he is still young at heart and carries the memories of days long gone by, willing to share his story to anyone with the time to listen. For me, this is what travel is all about – meeting someone who is genuinely full of joy and thus filling me with joy.