Pg Dato Asmalee

Last Friday, the 26th of June 2014, we were lucky to have the very first established Bruneian artist, Pg Dato Asmalee hold a motivational talk for our art department at PTEM. He explained his life’s journey through art, and his passion and commitment to painting and creating. He is 73 years old and still producing amazingly detailed work! He explained to us, a style he developed called "Zikirism", which is similar to Pointillism - a technique of painting by applying dots of pure colour, but with the firm remembrance of Allah, as he is very much motivated by his Islamic beliefs. A lot of his paintings are actually based on Islamic Ideology. Mind you, he only became a full time artist after retirement, but he managed to produce a significant amount of paintings during his years working for the Brunei government. So it was a real inspiration to hear someone who has paved such a successful career doing what he loves, still very much motivated and happy to share his work with others. Below are a few of his paintings (they are not full versions, and unfortunately I did not manage to take down the titles of the paintings).

Every painting he showed us included a story and a moral, and that his paintings served as a visual diary of his thoughts.