BB23 Print

SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHY My name: Julianus Artist name and on social media: Yulianus Yaps I'm a self-taught visual artist from Indonesia. I was born in 1950. Since childhood, I like to draw. This hobby started when I witnessed my brother-in-law drawing people's faces in pencil on paper cake wrappers. By fast and sloppy movements but managed to create an image that closely resembles the image of Kwan Yu, the legendary general in the classic Three Kingdoms story. The incident from that childhood was very memorable. I was obsessed and suddenly I became fond of drawing. This then becomes a lifelong hobby, wherever I am, drawing becomes a routine. After dropping out of school, at the age of 15, I was used to painting on used vinyl records. I sold this work on the street, this was my start as a professional drawing artist. In 1995, big floods hit the settlement where my house is located, almost 2 weeks the water as high as 1 meter inundate my house. The storage area for a collection of nearly 3,000 paintings of my works of three decades on a shelf and a wooden cupboard in the empty room behind my house collapsed, all of my paintings, mostly made of oil paint on canvas, plunged into the water. Almost all of my collections were destroyed. The flood disaster aroused enthusiasm to try and find other alternatives as a painting medium apart from those commonly used by painting artists such as oil, acrylic and watercolor paints. It was my hope to find a material that would make a painting waterproof, resistant to humid weather and resistant to chemicals. After years of experimenting, I found silicone rubber to be a suitable medium for my art work. This material has unique characteristics, inspired and challenged me to dig and explore deeper this material. It took me some time to find the right technique and mastery of this material before it was applied to my art work. After decades have passed, I have created thousands of abstraction works by using silicone rubber, and there are even paintings that are more than 150 meters long. Now silicone rubber has permanently become my experimental medium. However, I am not yet satisfied with myself, the exploration is still continuing to find the possibility of applying silicone rubber to other creative works such as sculptures or other visual works.