Rained out at this art show
by Arthur Sim

WHEN German-born artist Bettina Forget first arrived in Singapore, she was profoundly moved by the weather. 'It was such a privilege for me to be in a country where, when it rains, life doesn't stop,' she says.

Today, five years later, she is having her first art exhibition called Monsoon, featuring a series of 16 paintings that are a record of her stormy encounters. Forget loves everything about the earth's atmosphere but she is not about to proselytise about it by painting pretty pictures.

To get across the idea of how magnificent the monsoons are, she stood in the rain with a canvases laden with paint so that the raindrops would leave imprints on the wet paint. 'My neighbours think I am mad,' she says, but she does not care.

The 36-year-old artist came to Singapore as an expatriate wife. Her husband works in the finance industry. 'I tried being an expat wife for three weeks but I got so bored,' she confides. With a degree in graphic design from the prestigious St Martin's School of the Arts in London, she got freelance work easily as graphic designer to occupy her time but found the work unsatisfying. 'I could have coasted for the next 20 years on the money I was making but it was not what I wanted. So I asked myself what would be the hardest thing for me to do, and I decided it would be to be an artist,' she explains.

She then enrolled herself in a fine arts degree programme at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and graduated last year. Now, as an artist, she says her mission is to 'make invisible things visible'. This not only includes the range of emotions that inspires her when she is standing in the rain, but also the sense of loss she feels about Sütterlin, an Austrian alphabet out-lawed by the German dictator Adolf Hitler. This, she uses to record her feelings literally, adding that it also gives 'texture' to her work.

To add depth, she cuts out cloud-like shapes from the canvases, then stitches a reduced form of these back on to create an unusual three-dimensional quality which is almost sculptural. There is a palpable tension in these taut canvases of rain-splattered paint and tightly-strung patches of canvas.These weather diaries of Forget's will probably not make it onto the nightly weather report on TV. But somehow, each depiction seems more accurate.

Monsoon, an exhibition and sale of paintings by Bettina Forget, is on at Visual Voice Art Studio, 62A Neil Road till Friday. Opening hours are from 10 am to 7 pm. For more information, call 6324-2133.

Article by the Straits Times, Singapore, 27th March 2002

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