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Ayutthaya, Thailand
BOON ROD
GING GAOW
PHETMANEE
PANLAN
YOD YEAM
BIRD
In residence at Ayutthaya Elephant
Camp, Ayutthaya, Thailand
Reckless and impulsive, Bird is a born artist.
The night before classes were scheduled to begin at the Ayutthaya
Academy, Bird could barely restrain his enthusiasm. After the
trainers had gone to sleep, he broke into one of the storerooms
and stealthily pried to lid off one of the cans of paint that
had been set aside for the first lesson. He couldn’t find a
brush, so he improvised, dipping his trunk into the can and
smearing the camp’s buildings and corrals with sloppy streaks
of cobalt blue. In the morning, the surprised staff cleaned
up the mess, and Bird got off with a light slap on the trunk.
Like many elephant artists, Bird was born
into a family of timber workers, and the brute physicality of
his working class background informs much of his painting. Bird
approaches a blank canvas with a potent combination of exhilaration
and fury, swinging his trunk in broad, sweeping strokes, forward
and back, as if painting a fence. When he wants to change colors,
he tosses the brush onto the ground and impatiently waits for
a new one. His paintings, with their broad, tectonic lines of
black, dark blue, and forest green, have often drawn comparisons
to the work of Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline.—Mia
Fineman
NOM CHOK
In residence at Ayutthaya Elephant
Camp, Ayutthaya, Thailand
Nom Chok, who began painting at the
precocious age of two, is known to many as the “enfant terrible”
of the elephant art world. Born at the Ayutthaya Elephant Camp
to a mother who died during childbirth, Nom Chok made his first
painting by impulsively dipping his trunk into an open jar of
watery paint and blowing forcefully onto a nearby canvas. The
splattery effect was similar to that of Jackson Pollock’s first
drip paintings. Soon, however, Nom Chok graduated to broad housepainting
brushes, which he now wields with a childlike exuberance, covering
the surface of the canvas from edge to edge. He generally favors
deep, murky tones which he mixes with an obvious pleasure in
the creamy viscosity of the paint. As some critics have noted,
Nom Chok’s ethod is characterized by a driven, almost compulsive
quality: he will not stop working on a canvas until every last
bit of white has been obliterated.—Mia Fineman |
