Being raised in a family that was not particularly artistic, Nyoman Wijaya’s interest in painting first emerged when he drew the scenes of Wayang stories his grandfather told in his childhood time. As a teenager, Wijaya had worked with senior artists to paint traditional Wayang paintings on Balinese temples and castles, and joined an art apprenticeship called Sanggar Senin Kamis in Denpasar. The apprenticeship became one of his most formative experiences in art education because it was where he learned the basics of how to observe a subject and paint them through figure drawing.

The Balinese cattle often become the centerpieces of Wijaya’s artworks, inspired by the time he spent as a child to raise and care for them. His approach to drawing these cattle is similar to how one would paint a landscape, using warm lighting to reflect his personal fondness and intrigue for the gentle creatures. In some of his paintings, Wijaya would purposely leave certain elements seemingly unfinished as a way to jog his viewers’ creativity and pour their imagination into how the completed scene would look like, citing that it is more interesting to create the stories along with the audience instead of delivering his own completed story.