In the painting, one-year-old Marti Kerton sits naked on the beach, hair curly and lips in a pucker, a pail and shovel nearby, the sand and ocean captured in long, impressionistic swirls of brown and blue.

It's a simple scene, a slice of life, and in many ways typical of the work of Kerton's father, the revered Indonesian artist Sudjana Kerton.

"The Lone Wolf: The Art of Sudjana Kerton" opens tomorrow at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. The exhibition, arranged by Marti Kerton and personally curated by academy director Steven Little, is the first solo exhibition of an Indonesian artist in the academy's history.

For Sudjana Kerton, who died in 1994 at the age of 72, the power of everyday moments — particularly those of his native Indonesia — could be harnessed in a variety of media to express native culture and universal truth. Whether it was a family crowded onto a motorbike in Indonesia or a gathering of punk rockers in SoHo, Kerton consistently found humanity and art in plain view.

"(His work) speaks to everyone, to all cultures," says Marti Kerton, sitting outside her 'Aina Haina home, the ocean gray and still on one side, the highway hiccuping with intermittent traffic on the other. "What's depicted on canvas are scenes of everyday life. They're poignant, so filled with humor. They're sometimes serious, but always meaningful."

Sudjana Kerton's portrait of his baby daughter was done in New York in the 1960s. Though still struggling to make a name for himself, Kerton had at that point already accrued a wealth of worldly experiences from which he would draw repeatedly over the course of a remarkable career spanning more than 50 years.

"He was active as an artist at an important turning point in Indonesian history, from the end of Dutch rule through the Japanese occupation and then independence,"says Little. "It was a major transition, and not an easy one. I think his great love for his country and his exuberant nationalism comes across in his art."

The academy has a gallery of traditional Indonesian art. Little says the Kerton show will help the museum "cast a broader net" by representing a modern Indonesian artist with an expansive international perspective.

"He painted traditional Indonesian art just as Indonesia was moving into the modern world as its own player," Little said. "The big question is, 'How do you maintain your identiry in the face of overwhelming modernity?' That's a question we can understand in Hawai'i."

Marti Kerton, who was a member of the Hawai'i-based band Hat Makes the Man, remembers her father as "very charismatic but also hot-tempered, very unpredictable," and a gifted, politically aware artist whose drive and creativity made him an icon in his native country.

"Sometimes he'd be very generous and take us all out, and other times he'd be extremely frugal," says Kerton. "It just depended on his mood. He also got into politics a lot. He was always very opinionated about who was at the helm at the time."

Sudjana Kerton grew up in Bandung, West Java, and came of age during the waning days of Dutch occupation and the formation of the independent nation of Indonesia. As a young man, Kerton, who had been mentored by Dutch artists, joined the nationalist government of Sukarno (then Soekarno) and worked as an artistic journalist, capturing scenes of battle, negotiation and Dutch withdrawal.

SKETCHING ON FRONT LINE

"He sketched and painted events as they were happening," Marti Kerton says. "He just took a sketch pad to the front lines. He saw people's heads blown off and there he was sketching on his pad trying to get it all down."

Kerton left Indonesia in 1949, accepting a grant to study in Amsterdam. Virtually penniless, he nonetheless toured the artistic haunts of the masters in Amsterdam, Paris and Pontoise.

In 1951, Kerton got a scholarship to the prestigious Art Students League of New York, where he studied under Japanese artist Yasuyoshi Kuneyoshi.

"(Kuneyoshi) said something to my father that changed my father's outlook on painting forever," Marti Kerton said. "(He introduced) the concept of identity, self, into painting. Once my dad grasped that, that's when everything started to gel."

In 1953, Kerton contracted tuberculosis and was sent to the Bellevue Hospital Center, where he would be cared for by a nurse from Florida named Louise Holeman. A romance blossomed, and the two married soon after.

Those early years in New York were productive but difficult. As Kerton honed his craft, his wife worked long shifts at the hospital to support the family, which now included three children.

"My dad never held a real job," Kerton says. "He took a commercial artist job in the '60s, but he couldn't handle it. He felt like he wasn't being true to his art, so he quit and he just started painting and painting and painting.

"I'm not going to lie: It was hard," Kerton says. "My mother was stressed a lot of the time. But somehow or other we managed to get through it."

BOHEMIAN FAMILY LIFE

The family wasn't impoverished when it came to creative energy. Marti Kerton recalls the family's bohemian lifestyle, the parade of artists, poets, dancers, musicians and "crazy people" that passed through their house. The backyard was a graveyard of car parts and other materials for Sudjana Kerton's recycled-art projects.

Pressed for space, Sudjana Kerton set up an easel in his bedroom. The smell of paint and turpentine filled the house, a smell Marti Kerton still recognizes as home.

Marti Kerton says her relationship with her father was not as close at it might have been. Separated by language (the children did not grow up bilingual; Marti Kerton took it upon herself years later to learn her father's native Bahasa Sunda) and, to an extent, by culture, Kerton and her father found it difficult to connect.

"I never really knew him growing up," Kerton says. "There was the whole Asian concept of kids are kids and adults are adults, and the two aren't supposed to intermingle. Growing up, I never had a one-on-one relationship with him."

Kerton says that throughout her father's 25 years abroad, Sudjana Kerton never lost his sense of home, a home in whose creation he had played a role. And while he was at times criticized by fellow Indonesian artists for living abroad and for his controversial explorations in art, Kerton's reputation in his home country grew.

"Historically, he was important, not just because he was part of the revolution, part of the history of Indonesia, but because he portrayed a part of Indonesian life that is slowly going away," Marti Kerton says. "I wouldn't say the culture is totally lost, but it is eroding because of the influence of westernization, technology and new ideas — which (can be) good.

"His vision was always that sooner or later, what he was capturing on canvas was no longer going to be around," she says. "He thought it was important to preserve this heritage. It was not just journalistic, it gave him joy and pleasure to paint those things.

In 1976, after years of imagining his dream home (shaped like a picker's hat in honor of the country's working class), Kerton returned to Bandung and bought a plot of land on remote Dago Pacar Hill, the highest point in the city. There he built the Sanggar Luhur studio and gallery.

The return to Indonesia sparked what Marti Kerton calls her father's best and most prolific artistic period.

AN EXPLOSION OF JOY

"All of a sudden it was an explosion," Marti Kerton says. "His paintings became way more forceful. He previously painted in dark, muted, serious tones. When he moved back, it was like joy on canvas. It was really beautiful.

Kerton didn't abandon his focus on everyday people and events, or what had become his distinctive style (incorporating elements of cubism, impressionism and other movements), but he did employ a new, more vibrant color palette.

"I thought he had really found his muse," Marti Kerton says. "It was evident that his happiness showed."

Sudjana Kerton would continue his prolific outpouring of daring artwork until he succumbed to acute renal failure, the result of a misdiagnosed prostate problem.

In 1991, three years before Kerton's death, Marti Kerton visited her father in Indonesia. They backpacked to Jogjakarta ("my favorite place on earth," says Marti Kerton) and the temple at Borobudur.

"It was a real Indonesian adventure," Kerton says. "We traveled together, partied together. We had a drink together, and he reminisced about the old days.

"He was a different person," she says. "I got to know him like a friend. He realized I wasn't a kid anymore, and he could talk to me like a fellow artist, a contemporary. After that, our relationship changed dramatically."

Yet, Kerton says, in some sense her father has always been knowable through his art.

"The way he would communicate was through his art, she says. "The way to know him is to look at each painting. His expressions were on the canvas."

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.