Kartika has represented herself in striking painted and sculpted self-portraits as merged with her father Affandi on her right, and her mother Maryati on her left, which she says is her way of expressing how indebted she feels to her parents, and how much her identity and her path in life, as an artist and as a person, was determined by her relationship with them. Affandi’s importance in Kartika’s development as an artist is obvious and well recognised, but without Maryati’s influence art would perhaps have never become Kartika’s profession.
Reminiscing about her childhood in pre-WWII Java, Kartika remembers her mother commenting on her young daughter’s precocious enthusiasm for drawing and art, saying “What a pity you were born a girl. All you can do is have children. It would have been nice to have another artist in the family.” This observation made a huge and long-lasting impression on the young Kartika, who says that it goaded her to stubbornly persist in her aim to be taken seriously as an artist. As Kartika puts it, she was determined to fulfill her mother’s wish to have “another artist in the family” because she wanted to prove to her mother and to herself that she was capable of doing whatever she wanted to, that a woman could indeed be a mother *and* an artist.
Maryati was born in Bogor in West Java in 1916, the eldest daughter in a family with 10 children. Though she received no formal education growing up, she attended a class at age 15 to learn to read and write, and there she met and fell in love with her teacher Affandi who was 9 years her senior. They married in 1933, and had their only child Kartika in 1934. Maryati was Affandi’s nude model (portrayed from behind so as to obscure her identity from the public and preserve her modesty), and she helped him when he painted much as a nurse might assist a surgeon, preparing and handing him tubes of paint, and accompanying him as he worked in the open air.
Along with Kartika, she travelled with Affandi when he received a scholarship to paint in India in 1951, and then when he first went to exhibit in Europe in 1952. During these trips, Maryati took up drawing and painting herself, and began creating images in needlepoint embroidery. Her work was spontaneous and unschooled, and once when questioned about her approach to art she explained, simply “This is how I do it, and this is how I like it.” Affandi was proud of his wife’s skill, saying “As an artist, I envy her spontaneity and her freshness.”
Maryati died in 1991, one year after Affandi, and she is buried alongside him on the grounds of the Affandi Museum. Here are some photos of Maryati’s art from Kartika’s collection, as it appeared in a recent exhibition titled "Affandi and Maryati" in Yogyakarta.
