Rowins Paints With Soil and Coffee

The ground gives Rowins two things: color, and coffee.

When Rowins paints, he digs his palette from the ground. Soil in different colors, dried under the sun, crushed into powder once it's dry, then mixed with Elmer's glue, one color to a plastic cup.

He started at 18, learning through research, online videos, and from Waway Saway, the originator of Talaandig soil painting. Now Rowins teaches it too, to his own child and to other people in the community, ages 8 to 20.

The bigger pieces take a year, sometimes two, to finish.

Before a painting starts, there's a ritual. He needs:

• Three chickens
• A meter of red cloth, a meter of white
• A matchstick
• Soft drinks, candy, biscuits
• Seven cigarettes
• Coins

Only after that does the brush come out.

What ends up on the canvas is harvests, rituals, the tribe's dances, whatever the community lived through that season, painted in the exact colors of the ground it happened on. Rowins' favorites are the ones about the tribe, and about livelihoods.

He paints, his wife Cecel said, so people outside the community can see the situation of the country, the community, what's happening around them, and what indigenous people do.

Some of his paintings use only soil.

Others use only coffee, no soil at all.

When I asked where the paintings are shown, Cecel said: In their community, where they live.

Rowins is part of the Inhandig Tribal Multipurpose Cooperative, the same cooperative behind Good Cup's Inhandig coffee. The same ground that gives him soil and coffee for painting also grows the coffee.

When I asked Cecel how she and Rowins feel when he paints, she said they're happy because they get to see and share what he's painted, and explain what each one means.