Just browsing the web and came upon this guy website, he’s a designer…..liked
“If you ask me what I came to do in this world
I, an artist, will answer you
I am here to LIVE OUT LOUD! Krsna Mehta
Archives
All posts by Christopher Hogan
Good Students and good work.
My other young students made some interesting subject choices and I am proud of their work which was produced in less than 2 hours, they have listened and then painted well considered works.
It always promised to be a great event, Summer Festival at Laguna Phuket and yesterday was no exception, 9 budding young artists fronted up for an afternoon of painting their abstract art onto real artist’s canvases and made a great job of it too.
I taught a set of twins who, although young, worked diligently for the entire class.
“Colour is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.” Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944)
a quote from the artist credited as having created the first abstract watercolour.
Sometimes you just get to teach a young artist that shows great promise and yesterday was one of those days, I knew he was different when he said to me, ‘I want to paint like Kandinsky’ – not something that you hear everyday and especially not from a 7 year old.
I love this young man’s work, it is amazing especially when you think that he is of such a young age.
Driving back from Phuket Town we came up to a ute loaded with coconuts and on the back I thought I saw a monkey. Hope you like my pics and I have attached a press articles which highlight the work that these animals do in Thailand – interesting, now I know.
Official monkey business: picking 300 coconuts a day, all for a couple of bananas
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-414837/Official-monkey-business-picking-300-coconuts-day-couple-bananas.html#ixzz1VLXGHtAR
Thailand’s coconut-picking monkeys enjoy job security despite economy
By Richard S. Ehrlich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
BANGKOK, Thailand
In the heart of Asia’s financial meltdown, a lot of monkey business is earning steady profits for hundreds of hairy primates, delighted owners, no-nonsense trainers and the nation’s coconut industry.
Despite collapsing currencies and mass unemployment in Thailand and elsewhere, the beasts still have jobs on sprawling plantations as one of the world’s most unusual farm workers.
Thais have taught pigtailed macaque monkeys to climb tall coconut trees and pick only the ripest of coconuts.
The monkeys work for lower wages, and pluck more coconuts, than any human.
“Several hundred monkeys are working, picking coconuts,” said Wildlife Fund of Thailand (WFT) Secretary-General Pisit Na Pattalung.
“They are trained. There are schools for monkeys where they are sent for three to six months,” Mr. Pisit said in an interview.
“I am for it. The monkey is not suffering. The mother is trapped and the baby monkey is taken away, but the mothers mate again. It doesn’t kill the species, so it is OK.”
A monkey’s owner earns the equivalent of two cents for every coconut that the animal twists off the top branches of a tall palm tree and tosses to the ground.
“A monkey can pick 800 to 1,000 coconuts in a day, depending on its skill,” said Mr. Pisit’s WFT assistant, Honorong Yavalut. “The cost of maintaining a monkey is only about [60 cents] a day,” which the owner pays to feed and cage the animal.
He said the monkeys can be worth 200 dollars to 600 dollars after training. “They are used throughout Thailand, but mostly in the south, and just to pick coconuts, no other food.”
Asked whether the animals are ever abused by brutal trainers or owners, Mr. Pisit said a trainer “will never, ever, lay hands on his monkeys.”
A traumatized beast will not perform, he said, adding that angry monkeys are quick to bite.
Mr. Pisit insisted that a kindly approach to teaching and caring for the creatures was the key to success.
Monkey schools, which charge about 100 dollars, teach the animals to choose only fully ripe coconuts, and shun unripe green ones. Usually, they are at least two years old when training begins and males are favored because they are more obedient.
A monkey can live 20 to 25 years and work half its lifetime.
During the past few decades, loggers have harvested much of Thailand’s forests, reducing the monkey’s natural habitat. Ironically, the pigtailed monkeys might have become endangered if they were not prized for picking coconuts.
With less than two week remaining I will have ON SALE my original works of art at my gallery in Canal Village, come on down and get a bargain.
As part of Laguna Phuket’s Summer Festival I have been taking morning art classes at the newly opened Outrigger Resort Laguna Phuket, had an amazing outdoor studio where inspiration to paint marine images was easy!
Back at Canal Village in the afternoon…and a family class…..wonderful!
Sunday was my day-off and I spent that touring around Phuket, stopped off at the Marina and was happy to stop and chat with a family that live in Phuket and had taken my class earlier in the week. Small world. Then off to Rawai Beach to enjoy the delights of Phuket’s Seafood Festival. Festival’s everywhere on this beautiful island.
Here are some pics from my classes and also a funny little roadside BBQ we saw on our way back to Laguna Phuket yesterday. Enjoy your day! I’m off to see the folks at Allamanda Laguna Phuket where I will be hold classes at 10am this morning.
Maldives Traveller:.Anantara launches art aid for orphaned children
BY MALDIVES TRAVELLER STAFF
17 NOVEMBER 2010
Anantara Hotels, Resorts & Spas have successfully launched an aid programme to help orphaned and underprivileged Maldivian children by offering a series of inspiring art workshops.
The company’s Dhigu resort, which is situated around 19km from Malé International Airport in South Malé Atoll, last week celebrated its first art aid project with Anantara’s international artist-in-residence, Christopher Hogan.
The programme offered a dozen orphaned and adopted local children the possibility to explore, and enjoy, the craft of brush painting under Hogan’s intuitive and infectious tutoring. The children’s colourful artwork was then auctioned off to guests at the resort during a special cocktail reception on the beach later that evening. The total proceeds of the auction reached an impressive US$1,561, with one painting of a red angelfish reaching US$220 alone. A handful of other paintings from the children also topped the US$150 mark.
Claudia Pronk, general manager of three of Anantara’s resort and spa properties in the Maldives, told Maldives Traveller that she was “thrilled and excited that the focus of this special day would be on these special children.”
The aid programme is part of the company’s corporate social responsibility ethos to enhance the lives of underprivileged children in the Maldives by raising money for immunizations, eye tests, dental care, schooling, stationary, clothes, school bags and other essential resources.
A senior executive spokesperson for the Children’s Home of Villingili, where some 52 children are currently cared for, told Maldives Traveller that while the Maldives government helps subsidize the needs of their orphaned and underprivileged children with a respectable annual budget, donations and funds from the private sector are always welcomed, and often desperately needed.
“We have 11 sponsored staff and 26 governmental staff working in shifts around the clock for the children’s home, but a lot of our children are little babies who need 24-hour care and supervision, so funding and volunteering are always in constant need,” said the spokesperson.
The spokesperson went on to say that the care home is currently taking care of 12 newborn babies.
Bernard Columba, director of human resources at Anantara resorts Maldives, and the mastermind behind the art aid project, told Maldives Traveller that his plan was to achieve “an ongoing programme to help local children throughout the year.”
Said Columba: “We’re not really interested in just inviting the children’s home over for lunch or leisure activities once a month. What we really want to do is have an ongoing programme, in several stages, where we can teach children basic skills such as the arts and crafts, and then check up on them regularly throughout the year. We want to be part of a constructive process in the community.”
Artist and sculptor Christopher Hogan, who conducted the first art workshop programme for a dozen children, said an early desire to paint or draw could help teach the children to “explore a career in the creative arts when they come of age.” Each child was given a special ‘art pack’ after the workshop event, which consisted of paints, brushes, art books and other materials.
The second stage of the programme, which will include another dozen children from the Villingili home, will commence at Anantara Dhigu Resort & Spa in the near future.
