Talking to an artist
Last week, I visited an art gallery right across my workspace. And to my delight, since it is not very common, the artist (painter) was present. You can find out more about the artist H. Nur Cholis and his catalogue here
The general theme of the exhibition was “Heronesia” (Superhero Indonesia), a social critic on the urgency of not superheroes with super powers, but ordinary leaders with integrity and care for the citizens. However, among the drawings, there was another theme, which were inspired by memories of his now deceased wife. One of them is the sketch of fleeting memories below.
And just like that, we talked more about our lives, our works, our families, and it felt like we were some old friends catching up. Doing art in Indonesia is certainly not a very rewarding profession, so he also run other business making helmets, with retro designs trending once more.
I remember reading some blog about “Talking to a stranger” (still searching for the exact post). In this age of online society, we rarely make new friends anymore, our so-called friends are the friends we already made and we interact with them on social media with a like or a comment. And what's even rarer is an interaction with a stranger. There are too many stories of how talking to strangers might lead them to take advantage of us, or even hypnotize and harm us. Or they might not have bad intention, but they are going to spam us with marketing, insurance, loan, etc. We are much safer interacting with our phones in the public spaces.
The experience of talking to the senior artist showed me what’s missing in our fast pace high tech lives. Ironically, after saying goodbye, he then might become just another online friends.