On May 3rd at night, we arrived, exhausted but happy to Indonesia.
We were were picked up at the airport by Joan……We immediately became enamored by his character, generosity, personality, his paintings and thousands stories of all his travels around the world…and his incredible home in Bali….
Joan is an incredible person, embodies and epitomizes the soul and spirit of our journey…..
Joan is a Spanish artist, he was born in Vic, near Barcelona, a small town in the area of the Mediterranean sea. At a very young age, he entered the Benedictine order of the Monastery of Montserrat and became a monk , there he studied Philology and Theology and started to practice his art, creating beautiful pieces of ceramics, illustrating magazines for children and organizing the Museum of the Monastery.
His studies took him all over Europe and later on to Istanbul and the Middle East. In 1976, at the end of his student life in Paris, he asked the Abbot to let him travel for 1 year to the Americas before going back to the Monastery. What was going to be one year, ultimately, became a journey around the world that lasted for 10 years, 10 months and 10 days. After these years, Joan continued his trip, he sailed to Japan and from there to the Pacific Islands, Australia, Asia and Africa.
During all these traveling years, Joan painted and lived from the earnings of many exhibitions in Colombia, Perú, Japan, Thailand, Philippines, India… but It was in his first trip to Bali that he realized he found his true home. He returned in 1987 and gradually created a permanent base.
Now Joan works in Bali for 8 months every year, surrounded by the magnificent greenery of his garden and the tranquility that he finds in the Balinese island.
Joan has become part of our ives in a very short time. We feel incredibly luck for having got to know him ‘under the skin’ and learned from his incredible life. We have not left this place yet but we have promised ourselves that we will come back to Joan’s house with the family over years to come.
