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Phuket Magazine Vol. 13.1

Where Dreams Come True
For some people, Phuket is the ideal spot for their dream house and the interior of that house is where the dream comes true

Art on the Eighth Latitude
For others, Phuket works its magic, inspiring artists to create.

King’s Cup Review - A Great Regatta
Though breezes were lighter than perfect, the fifteenth regatta proved that the show goes on in any conditions.

Investing in Phuket: A Rock Foundation or Castles in the Sand?
Phuket is not only beautiful but it’s also a safe haven in these

Ice Cream: Thai Style
Ever have ice cream on a hot dog bun? Try it — you might like it, as well as other ice cream novelties as only the Thais can create them.

Soft Lighting, Softer Music and Spicy Thai Cuisine

A Lazy Lunch at Rydges Beach Resort

Expat Diary: Jai Yen. Jai Yen Yen

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By Simon J. Hand
 

Since the arrival of the area's first visitors, Phuket and environs has been an inspiration and a lodestone for itinerant scribblers, wandering minstrels and drifting artists. Some come for a season and find they never get around to leaving. Others find that Phuket stays so close to them that - wherever they travel - returning is never difficult.

Among those drawn to this tropical muse, the artists have the best of it. There are only so many words, after all; but visual representation is infinite - as Monet proved with his endless water lilies. Local artist Marilyn Band, for instance, says her sources of inspiration on the island have remained unchanged for over 20 years.

"It's in the little stalls," she says wistfully. "The simple village life. Though it's fast being eradicated. My inspiration hasn't changed; there's just a lot less of it than there used to be. When I first started visiting Phuket, they all lived like that. Now…."

Phuket's gradual shift from bucolic fishing and farming community towards tourist metropolis has sometimes been a disappointment to Marilyn. Having observed the transformation in short annual snapshots, those changes have appeared all the harsher. Still, although Marilyn has to look a little harder these days, this hasn't affected the quality of her work. The striking colours and lilting lines of her village and rustic scenes display an easy familiarity with the Andaman Sea light - a quality that stands in distinct contrast to that of her northern Brittany home. Perhaps this explains why she can so accurately capture the languorous sensuality of the island - emphasizing elements of the exotic that the tourism industry so far failed to exploit.

While Marilyn Band is the epitome of the well-travelled artist - her "Voyage to Zanzibar" exhibition of a few years back is still talked about today - and despite her disillusionment with the bride-price that progress has exacted from the island, she has rarely missed a year's visit, has never been entirely devoid of inspiration on those visits, and will still be coming back to Phuket for many more years to come. And even she has to admit that development does have some benefits. For one thing it's much easier to get art supplies these days.
"Of course communications of all sorts are excellent now," she remarks, "and I suppose more people means more artists."

Indeed it does. One such recent arrival is 25-year-old Hana Davies, fresh from a successful exhibition at the Sanctuary, a Brighton gallery. Hana, after dabbling with different formats and materials at art school and following a visit to Thailand a couple years back, finally fell in love with batik. "I really like working with the wax," she says. "Since I found batik, art is so much more enjoyable. It's like art therapy."

A love of art from the age of six, plus the influence of her mother's work as an illustrator of children's books, has given many of Hana's early batiks an edge of innocent fantasy. What is striking, however, is how she has taken an art form inherently linked with Asia - with Indonesia, more specifically - and adapted it to convey Western ideals and emotions. A brooding Welsh landscape of rolling hills and picture-book pastures, for instance, takes on an entirely different light when portrayed in the soft, flowing lines of batik, giving one an uncomfortable feeling that Turner may have chosen the wrong medium.

Hana's move to Phuket brings with it the opportunity to further explore her potential, to study the art at its source and delve into some of the various methods of application. This has lead her to the workshop of another Phuket-based artist, Sompob Iewsakul, who - as life would have it - was also lured to Phuket in the pursuit of artistic knowledge.

Sompob studied his own peculiar form of batik - a complicated procedure requiring back painting and leaching of excess dyes with tissue paper - under the late master Ajarn Chuchart Rawijan, of Rajabhat University. After Ajarn Chuchart's death, Sompob returned to Phuket from his home in southern Thailand's Yala Province, to pick up the mantle of his master and save this particular form of the art from extinction.

It's been a hard-run two years for the 30-year-old artist, who balances attempts to preserve his art through education with more immediate priorities of rent and food. However, the demands of his work as a commercial artist, producing tropical fish T-shirts and swaying palm sarongs for the tourist market, leave him precious little time to work on his original pieces, which are inspired by Buddhist imagery. This is - and has been for many years - the frustrated lament of most jobbing artists, and few can claim to fulfill their artistic aspirations while producing for commercial gain. On Phuket, however, all things are possible.

One example is John Underwood. Another relatively recent arrival to Phuket, John's work is possibly the most internationally famous of all the artists on Phuket, even if he himself is less well known, for thousands of people trample his work daily in Australia.

To explain, John once ran the "Artbusters" team, who created unique 6x4 metre and 4x4 metre Italian glass floor mosaics for the international airports at Melbourne and Brisbane. A former student of Victoria College of Fine Arts and a sculptor by craft, John seems to have hit upon an ideal formula for incorporating high art into the hardcase world.

Examples of his work can also be found ornamenting the Petronas Towers complex in Kuala Lumpur, in the shape of a family of leaping stainless-steel dolphins, and at the Australian embassy in Bangkok, where the banquet room is functionally decorated with a three-metre moulded glass dining table that John's team created at his workshop here on the island. Closer to home, you can appreciate John's work upon the walls of the new JW Marriott Resort and Spa - not in landscapes or murals, but in 1,000 woven burnished-steel light fittings, created using the same state-of-the-art laser cutting techniques he applied to the Petronas dolphins.

John's reasons for relocating to Phuket were also art-inspired. After several years of playing corporate manager in Bangkok, he was tired of doing more paperwork than art and decided that a change of air and scenery would do him and his inspiration a lot of good.

"I'm here to enjoy myself," he says, the light of untold artistic adventures flickering in his eyes. "Phuket is a small and vibrant community," he says. "I'm hoping to join up with some of the local artists down here to work some on projects together." So, not only drawing inspiration from the island, but also from the other artists who share this muse.

Although Phuket has played siren to dozens of passing artists, this is not to say that it has not similarly inspired island natives. Indeed, two of the most successful artists working on original commercial art are Chernporn and Namphon Kanjanasaya, the Phuket-born sibling design team behind Ceramics of Phuket, and the inspiration for their art is in their blood.

Growing up on Phuket, while their father worked as a tin miner, was inspiration enough for the two sisters and, though Namphon went to study marine biology in Bangkok - a decision influenced by their shared love of the Andaman - when she returned to the island it was art rather than angelfish that intrigued her. Namphon's desire to create soon infected her sister and before long the two were manufacturing ceramics of all varieties and winning acclaim and respect from clients that include most of the major hotels, restaurants and spas on the island. They have also built up an impressive export market, with their work showing up in such exclusive destinations as the Maldives, where the sisters’ ocean-inspired creations have found an appreciative audience.

There's also something of a paternal influence upon some of their work, as they have devised a method of blending tin ore with clay that creates a unique crazed sheen within the texture of the finished piece. Continuous development and experimentation is at the root of their success, but they do maintain one rigid standard during the design. "Every piece must be useful first," says Chernporn. "Design follows function."

With this in mind, the sisters are entering a new phase of creativity - finding ways to combine their talents in ceramics into furniture design. Considering their success so far, expect the results to be impressive.

Of course, for all the success stories there are just as many - if not more - tales of misfortune. The recent tragic death of Chirasak Pattanapong in a Chalong road accident shows just how fragile our links to exceptional art can be. Friends and devotees claim that Chirasak's move from Bangkok seven years ago rendered a remarkable change in his work. A former student of the Thai Academy of Fine Arts, his style moved from brooding intensity to a lighter, more elemental approach, a change inspired, undoubtedly, by his relocation to the island.

However, from his death springs hope for a new generation of artists. One month after his passing, Chirasak's family put all of his finished items and works in progress up for auction. The proceeds from the sale of these beautiful pieces are to go towards funding the studies of other artists. Though we suffer the loss of this one shining light, it will soon be rekindled from the sparks of his bequest.

To finish, here's a story of how the twists and turns of fate can fall upon a Phuket artist in the most unusual and inspiring of ways. Five years ago, with no formal training in art, Kathy Manthei set out from her Sacramento home to discover Asia and to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. After a chilly and apathetic time in Korea, she travelled through China, Southeast Asia, Nepal and India, finally stopping on Phuket in 1998. Despite packing paints and sketch pads all the way from the US and halfway across the continent, it was not until she was settled into her new island home that the inspiration began to flow. The results, influenced by the images and incidents of her travels, were magnificent. Within 18 months, she had her first exhibition of mixed media, at the Boathouse in Kata.

This in itself would be achievement enough for many, but fate had more in store for Kathy. By chance, a lady visiting Phuket from Phnom Penh caught sight of Kathy's work, long after the gallery had closed for the evening, through the window of the Boathouse. So impressed was she that she instantly commissioned an exhibition for her chic café in the heart of the Cambodian capital. For a year Kathy laboured to get the exhibition together, then held a one-day preview at her home a couple of months before she was to leave for Phnom Penh. To her surprise, delight - and a little consternation - she sold so many pieces at her preview she had to create an almost entirely new exhibition for Cambodia.

"I guess my work sells best on Phuket because everybody knows me," she says, looking back and laughing. "It's always the last people I would ever expect that buy my work."

Kathy is planning another exhibition on the island for later in the year, though she's not in a great hurry. "An exhibition is work for work," she says. "I love to paint for painting's sake."