Mural Painting as Democratic Process

by Carmen Nge
Pictures by Ju Lynn Ong

There are multiple ways to conceive and execute a mural painting. According to Wilfredo, in their home base, murals usually begin with one person choosing a concept or idea worthy of visual public expression. The same person would then go about finding other Anting Anting members to help him create his vision. It is not uncommon to have small groups of about 5 artists working on one mural.

Mural painting is inherently different from other kinds of artwork because, as Wilfredo maintains, “this process makes us think differently because we have to share ideas. When we do our individual work, we don’t have to share.” Lawrence considers murals to be a challenge because “most artists are very individualistic and need to have chemistry with others. The important thing is to figure out how to fit as a group first.”

In the early stages of planning their murals, Anting Anting members spend a considerable amount of time brainstorming and coming up with suggestions for content and theme. With Matahati, they replicated this process but omitted one of its components. Alfredo confesses, “In Anting Anting we are more aggressive about what we want in terms of mural content but here we are not as aggressive. There is a lot of adjustment and a need to take on different perspectives when working with Matahati.”

Ahmad Fuad Osman, one of the members of Matahati, chuckles when he reflects on their working process for the first day. “It was chaos,” he reveals with a smile. “Everyone doing their own thing can be quite chaotic because you have figurative and abstract artists working together on the same canvas.”

For their murals in the Philippines, Anting Anting usually break themselves up into 2 groups: the abstract artists and the figurative artists. After working on a mural for a while, one member from each group will cross-over and the abstract and figurative gets integrated at a later stage of the artistic process. For their Kuala Lumpur mural project, abstract and figurative artists had to work side by side, creating the mural simultaneously.

To limit the kinds of visual confusion and incoherence that could occur from this method of working, the two groups had the abstract artists paint in framed or boxed sections of the mural. This writer finds it interesting that the artists found a need to contain the abstract elements in the mural; it is as if without frames and limitations abstract art would threaten to disrupt the rest of the visual narrative.

Fuad sees it differently: “If you look at it another way, then you could also say that the abstract work is highlighted—our eyes are drawn to them because they are visibly positioned and framed.”

“In many ways this is highly intuitive work,” Fuad continues. “The process itself is constantly changing. We have to adapt what we do according to the images that are being created. Each artist has to think about supporting the image before him.”

A great deal of problem-solving becomes organically built into the process of collaboration as well. Members of both groups have daily debriefing sessions after 6-8 hours of mural painting where they discuss what they have accomplished and brainstorm how to proceed the following day.

One of the early successes of this brainstorming session had to do with the problem of time: with less than a week at their disposal, the artists were understandably worried about being able to complete their mammoth task.

The time constraint was partially solved by having the artists generate a pool of images that they then collaged together digitally according to scale. Thus the mural, which is not painted directly onto a wall surface, first began as digital art; by having the background digitally reproduced on canvas, this significantly reduced the amount of time spent in the first stage of the mural process.

When the chaos from day one ensued, artists revisited the original digital collage and focused on the specific images they generated during the brainstorming session. Rather than subsume their individual styles and personal visual touches under a homogenous group aesthetic, Anting Anting was encouraged to exploit them. In an interesting divergence from the traditional working method of mural painting, this collaboration emphasizes individuality.

This sense of individuality is reflected in how each artist understands the central message of the mural. Wilfredo, Fuad and Alfredo see the boat in the mural as emblematic of a journey undertaken by the Malays and the Filipinos.

For Alfredo this journey harkens back to a period in history before the arrival of the Spaniards to the Philippines. According to him, they have studied about how Malay traders came to the Philippines on boats called balangay and this word has since morphed into the term barangay, which in Tagalog means ‘community’. Fuad said he was surprised to find out that Malay and Tagalog languages share a lot of words in common: mata, saksi, aku, kami, etc.

Bayu sees the boat as having more personal significance: “Our programme [with Anting Anting] is like a boat, handled by many people, not just one. Within the boat is a group of people going from one place to another, doing various projects with each other.”

Manny considers the mural to be a “futuristic vision of what we hope to see. It is a post-cataclysmic event where the survivors are victims of the onslaught of globalization. They are on a boat, like Noah’s Ark. Under the water are the structures that have victimized the people. Outwardly they are like images of a fragmented scene. Form-wise this keeps to current aesthetics, with the experience of fragmentation and alienation.”

What remains to be seen is how well the various fragmented parts fit to form a whole. Can the individual mark of each artist ultimately transcend their aesthetic specificity and contribute towards visual and thematic coherence?

Ultimately, what is most fascinating to this writer is not the end result of an intense collaborative endeavour but the process of give and take necessitated by the mural painting tradition. It is a tradition that demands that artists veer from the path of egoism and self-interest to immerse themselves in a new kind of artistic labour, one that clearly engages the public beyond the domain of art for art’s sake.