I know that somewhere ’round here I mentioned buying some elephant art when we were in Thailand a few years ago. The piece itself is too large for me to scan or to get a decent picture of, otherwise I’d post it here. BUT I was so excited to find the elephant art site recently — complete with profiles of all the elephant artists, including Wan Pen, the elephant who painted our piece. (We know this because when we purchased the piece, they gave us a card with the artist’s name, picture, and bio. I loved that. So much fun.)
The organization is called The Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project and here is a link directly to Wan Pen’s page. Scroll down and you can see examples of her work. When we bought our piece, I think she was fairly new to her artistic endeavors. Looking at her recent pieces, I can see she still likes flowers and red and green — ours has some yellow, too — but the flowers on ours are more primitive, not as flowing and easy. She’s grown as an artist! Haha. Also — note the prices on those paintings. $600-650. Wow. Uhm, we paid 25 dollars American. Granted, we had to fly to Thailand for 18 hours and throw up on a plane and such, but still. Pretty big price differential, no? Notice the names of other elephant artists on the side bar there, too. I spent some time over the weekend clicking on all of those artists, reading their bios and checking out their work. Some of the bios crack me up, talking about the elephant’s personality and phobias: “He’s afraid of chickens.” “She’s afraid of cats.” Like this one:
Confident and outgoing as she is, Boombim does have one fear: dragonflies. She does not like taking baths in the river when there are many dragonflies around, but she is brave when she must be. Boombim deals with her phobia by immersing her entire body in the water, head included, in order to avoid the dragonflies.
Poor Boombim! I cannot stop picturing her dunking her massive self under water to avoid some flitty little dragonflies. Why does that make me so weirdly happy?
If you click on some different elephants, be sure to scroll down their page to check out their work. I’m still amazed at the different styles, just as I was when we visited the Maesa Elephant Camp. (Click around to find elephants from that particular camp.) We actually got to watch the elephants as they were painting and their styles ran the gamut: Impressionist elephants. Pointillist elephants. Abstract elephants. And they all really got into it. Dancing around a bit. “Smiling.” Totally focused on their canvases. They seemed to completely love what they were doing. I remember standing there thinking, “I am watching an elephant paint. An elephant is PAINTING.” Maybe the Creator has hardwired all his creations to CREATE. That thought has never left me since witnessing that. It was a truly surreal joy to watch.
Anyway, I link to this to share some of that joy with you. Click around on the different elephants. You will so enjoy it.
I be done seen ’bout everything
When I seen an elephant paint!
This amazes me!
Someone sent me an e-mail a few months ago with a video of an elephant painting. I can’t tell you how many times I watched that video trying to decide if it was some kind of trick photography. I even did a Snopes search to find out if it was for real. The elephant held that brush so deftly, and seemed to be totally engrossed in creating. I found it to be enchanting. It made me smile. Now I find out that you not only have one of the paintings, but you met the artist in person. It IS for real!! I’m jealous.
she is brave when she must be
that absolutely kills me. Go Boombin!!
NF — You got that right. Um, they played soccer, too. I’m not kidding.
Olga — I know. It seems like something that just can’t be real. Even when you’re watching it, you’re like, “No WAY!”
sheila — I love the bio on elephant Somjai, too:
Somjai was a natural and soon learned to paint flowers. However, he loves his elephant friends so much that it came as no surprise when he quickly used his skills to paint elephants. He now creates stunning, realistic pictures of his fellow pachyderms.
Aww.
Well, it’s like that whole “write what you know” thing – he’s painting what he knows. I love him!!
Check out the bio on Ging Gaow. Elephant dung paper! “Art from both ends of the elephant.” Recycling at it’s best.
sheila — Hahahaha! Exactly. There’s another elephant in the group who does elephant portraits and there are actually samples of the pieces. I’ll have to try to find them.
Olga — Yeah. I saw that and thought, “oh, good idea,” then wondered if ours was dung paper and it seemed less good for a second.