Selamat Ari Gawai! Gayu Guru Gerai Nyamai!

Iban Longhouse Interior
Acrylic on brown paper, 20cm x 14cm

2021

. . .

Today is Gawai here in Sarawak. For those who are new or unfamiliar with this holiday, it is the harvest festival of the Dayaks (local indigenous people of Borneo Island), and it is celebrated every year on 1st June. This is normally the time when our Dayak brothers and sisters would take a trip back to their respective villages to be with their families and ngabang, as they laugh and cheer over a bountiful feast and a sea of tuak (local rice wine). This year, things had to be a bit different, given the current state of the pandemic here in Sarawak.

But regardless, the Gawai spirit lives on as friends and colleagues take to social media and other online means like ZOOM calls to reconnect. I like to think of it as virtual ngabang.

And in keeping with that spirit, I thought I’d do a painting to celebrate together, albeit in a small way.

I have planned this since yesterday, though I wasn’t sure what I was going to draw. All I knew was that I had this urge to draw something for the occasion. I initially thought of doing something similar to the ‘Stavkirke’ painting, where I would have the Iban longhouse shrouded in mist and our little character as a silhouette in the foreground looking up at it. I thought it was okay, so I went over to Google to look for reference photos, but couldn’t find anything that ‘spoke’ to me.

And then I found this:

Source: https://www.experiencetravelgroup.com/borneo/hotel/iban-longhouse

I thought it was quite an interesting photograph to study (especially in terms of lighting and shadows) so I decided, instead of that landscape picture I had in mind, I’d make a painting of this instead.

So I began with a simple sketch. I then added a figure in the center to populate it, because I just love adding little subjects to paintings.

Then, I transferred this over to a bigger sketchbook with brown paper in it. 

I can't exactly say what my reason for using brown paper is, except that I felt like I should. Then I started marking in the shadows and lights. 

Once I have the general shadows and lights laid out, I started to add in the details. The following pictures will show the process. 

I ended up using mostly phthalo blue, burnt sienna, yellow ochre and white for the painting, with a little bit of brilliant red in places. I avoided using blacks mostly because I wanted to try playing around warm and cool tones to depict light and dark in the picture.

And it turned out better than I thought. For much of I focused mostly on what were illuminated by the light and did not fixate so much on what lingered in the shadows; those received maybe a few random strokes at best.

Overall, I am quite happy to have work on this painting. I have learnt quite a fair few things, especially when it came to disregarding things hidden in shadows, focusing instead of shaping what the light touches.

Selamat Ari Gawai. Gaya Guru Gerai Nyamai.