A deeper appreciation for art

TEN THAI ART students recently saw their wildest dreams become reality when they were selected to take part in the sixth edition of the annual “Young Artists Talent” project and flew out to Los Angeles for a 10-day stay packed full of activities and adventure.

“I was so excited about making this journey,” Jarasporn Chumsri from King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Lat Krabang, told XP. “The night before our departure, I even slept with an art book on Impressionism borrowed from the library. When I arrived here and saw my favourite Impressionist paintings at the museums, I didn’t want to ever leave.”

“It made me much more aware of the differences between museums in Thailand and in the States. The museums here are wonderful in terms of their decoration and architecture, which are in harmony with the works of art they are showing,” said Sinsawad Jantaphaison from Rajamangala University of Technology Lanna.

“I’m excited to see the masterpieces and painters from different times and would like to spend much more time absorbing them,” added Sita Inyai from Silpakorn University.

The seven other students, Chatcharin Chuekompeng, Kodsoung Eangubon, Narongrit Galajit, Pattarawit Boonprom, Rattana Sudjarit, Sittiphon Lochaisong, and Kusofiyah Nibuesa, were equally thrilled to be able to appreciate their favourite works face-to-face rather than in a book, saying the experience would motivate them to create.

Supported by the Culture Ministry’s Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, the “Young Artists Talent” project is the brainchild of National Artist Kamol Tassananchalee, who is convinced that the best way of educating art students is by allowing to experience the real world of art.

The young people spent their first day at the J Paul Getty Museum, which is exhibiting JMW Turner’s works until May 24. They were first shown a video and came away impressed by the statement: “They speak to art. Art speaks back to them.”

“It’s true,” said Kamol, who founded Thai Art Centre in Los Angeles in 1979 and the Thai Art Council USA in 1982. “Art is alive; it can respond to people who are appreciating it. The painter transmits the essence of his spirit to his creation, the painting. Art is concerned with the feeling more than the understanding. Turner’s works are about atmosphere and we have to use our thoughts and our imagination. Most of his painting is like an unfinished image, blurred and with the watercolours swallowing each other.”

 Kamol led the youngsters in examining John Baldessari’s “Specimen (After Durer)”, as well as Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises” and Edgar Degas’ “After the Bath”.

“Baldessari didn’t copy but rather borrowed German artist Albrecht Durer’s image of a stag beetle and made it his own by using modern-day materials such as ink-jet printing mounted on a fibreglass panel and inserting the steel pin into the canvas. It is a kind of mixed media work,” he explained.

The next lesson from Kamol touched on the functions played by architecture, decoration and the environment in the museum. That was achieved through visits to artist Diana Wong’s studio and residence, one in Santa Monica and the other perched high above Malibu. The Hong Kong-born artist has lived in Los Angeles for more than four decades and is well known for her early impressionistic portraits and landscapes as well as her more recent abstract compositions.

“I’m amazed at how calmly the 78-year-old artist continues to work and the way she keeps her works,” commented Sittiphon Lochaisong from Silpakorn University.

“It’s like a deliberate accident,” Kamol explained. “It seems that she doesn’t intend to paint but conversely enjoys doing it. When a shape or texture occur by accident, she starts focusing on it. Although she is nearly 80, she is still able to create. Think of French artist Henri Matisse. He was wheelchair-bound but still worked with the help of an assistant. Or Pierre-Auguste Renoir who painted with a brush tied to his arthritic hand.”

In San Francisco, the students visited the Leland Stanford Junior Museum, which is today known as the Iris and B Gerald Cantor Centre for Visual Arts. It’s on the campus of Stanford University and is home to the largest collection of Auguste Rodin’s bronze sculptures – 199 in all – including such famous works as “The Gates of Hall”, “The Three Shades”, “The Thinker” and “The Kiss”.

The museum is divided into “concepts”, among them Arts of Africa, Bay Area and Beyond, Early 20th-Century Collection, and Drama of Heaven and Earth for Japanese artists. The students were particularly impressed by Duane Hanson’s life-size sculpture “Slab Man”, a lifelike image of a man leaning with his left hand against a wall. 

At the de Young Museum, they marvelled at masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland, “Botticelli to Braque” including Rembrandt’s “A Woman in Bed”, Sir Anthony van Dyck’s “Princess Elizabeth and Princess Anne, Daughters of Charles I”, and Sir Henry Raeburn’s “Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch” then admired the Impressionist collection, which encompasses Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies”, at the Legion of Honour near the Golden Gate Bridge.

Chatcharin from Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi expressed his fascination with van Gogh, while Rattana from Rajamangala University of Technology Rattanakosin Poh Chang Campus and Kusofiyah from Prince of Songkhla University’s Pattani Campus couldn’t get enough of Pablo Picasso.

“I was very impressed with Jacques Lipchitz’s bronze sculptures ‘The Guitar Player’ and ‘Sailor with Guitar’ which made me imagine the sound and rhythm of music,” said Kodsoung from Poh Chang.

“And I was amazed by John Anster Fitzgerald’s ‘Fairies in a Bird’s Nest’. The painting is about a bird’s nest and its frame is also made of a real bird’s nest,” enthused Narongrit from Silpakorn University.

The adventure ended with a trip to the snow-covered hills of Yosemite National Park, made all the more enjoyable by several opportunities to record happy memories in paint as well as photographs.