What's so great about a painting of a nuclear family: a half-naked Pak, Mak, Boy and Girl, at home in an agrarian setting? Hey, but who's the nubile woman sitting on the floor in yonder side with her knees raised up and facing viewers straight? A neighbour, a femme fatale? The figures are all etched caricature-like in dimming light and in pastel hues in a reassuring calm. Sudjana Kerton was like an Indonesian Daumier with his social-economic pastiche of daily life. Sudjana always metamorphosised to the subject he painted. "I share the feeling, the happiness, the misery, the hunger or thirst, the rain, the feet." One thing for sure, it couldn't be anything related to his controversial claims about being abducted by aliens, which he had painted about in 1978 - his only non-'Indonesian' subject. Sudjana Kerton documented the aftermath of Indonesian Independence under Sukarno with anti-Dutch fervour, working as a Sundanese artist-journalist for the newspaper, Patriot. Ironically, he got a scholarship to study Art first in the Netherlands and France in the 1950s. Somehow, he ended up for two-and-a-half decades in the United States, studying at the Art Student League in New York City, and marrying an American nurse, with whom he had three children. In the West, he also soaked up the Mexican Revolution, and eventually returned to Indonesia in 1976, resettling back in hilly Sanggar Luhur in his hometown Bandung. A major book on him, Sudjana Kerton: The Aesthetics of Revolution and the Birth of a Modern Artist, was written by Astri Wright in 1999.