"Flowers in the Bangkok Night" by Paul Dorsey in The Nation 11 January 2015..............

"Sunflowers" - Chris Coles

"FLOWERS IN THE BANGKOK NIGHT"
by Paul Dorsey (from The Nation 11 January 2015)

Noir painter Chris Coles opens a show this week featuring, of all things, blossoms from his mum’s garden

Chris Coles, the American expressionist painter who's spent so many years in Thailand that every evening stroll becomes a neon nightmare, has suddenly gone all flowery.

Faced with the predicament of having no paintings that his mother back in Maine would be proud to show her friends - his usual subjects are go-go dancers and their lusty patrons - Coles did the rounds of the garden.

And now six floral portraits are among the 21 works going on view in the exhibition "Flowers, One Butterfly and the Bangkok Night", opening on Thursday at the Brainwake Cafe and Gallery on Sukhumvit Soi 33.

Apart from the buds and the butterfly (of which more in a moment), the pieces in the show are more typical of Coles' output - snapshots from the garish nightlife of Bangkok and Pattaya (and Phnom Penh, recently added to the itinerary) and of the denizens that crowd into it.

This is no "nightmare" for him, of course, but rather a tantalising and endlessly compelling tableau in need of recording. There are drunks and ladyboys and drunken ladyboys, shrieking signage and hi-so hangers-out.

"Many of my expressionist-style noir paintings are drawn from the context of the Bangkok night, a vast, multi-layered entertainment spectacle that involves all manner of people from Southeast Asia, Asia and the entire world," Coles says in a promotion for the exhibition.

And amid this spectacle he has witnessed flowers grow, flourish and wither.

"While my 'Bangkok Night' paintings are drawn from and inspired by the people, visuals and ambience of the actual Bangkok night, they also present a metaphorical vision of a noir, globalised, modern world where people of every background and status mix and mingle in all sorts of ways, alienated, predatory and calculating, clinging to good intentions as well as bad, with intimacy and feelings both real and imagined."

There are, he says, "all sorts of consequences and outcomes, both intended and unintended".

"But in the metaphorical, more generalised sense, Bangkok's many thousands of night workers can also be seen as colourful, sometimes beautiful, often sweetly fragrant flowers which beckon to the many colourful butterflies and hungry bees floating by to pause, say hello and visit.

"Tragically, the lifespan of these thousands of flowers is often very short, an all-too-rapid but inevitable transition between birth, blooming, replication, decay and death."

The flowers, as Coles points out, invariably draw the metaphorical butterflies and bees, attracted by their radiance and scent and hungry for their pollen, so to speak. These visitors "are in a rush themselves to mate and replicate before their own brief moment of life in this world comes to an end".

The metaphor naturally applies perfectly well also to Bangkok's "tens of thousands of sex workers and their hundreds of thousands of customers", he says. In fact one suspects that it's this particular end of the biosphere that Coles had in mind all along.

The artist sheds none of his bold composition and heavy blocks of pigment in rendering what might ostensibly be "delicate" flora. A botanist might be hard-tasked to identify the individual species, but there's no denying the impact of these canvases.

They're not going to turn anyone into a naturalist, but they are memorable, and they do sit well alongside "Beer Bar Asoke" and "Midnight Patpong".

MAKES SCENTS

- "Flowers, One Butterfly and the Bangkok Night" opens at 7pm on Thursday at the the Brainwake Cafe and Gallery, 27/1 Sukhumvit Soi 33, near Peppina's restaurant .

- The paintings will be taken from the wall as they're sold, so arrive early to see them all.

- British "noir poet" John Gartland will give a reading from his book "Bangkok: Heart of Noir", which features illustrations by Chris Coles.

- For more details, check (02) 005 0026.

"Creatures of the Night" article from The Nation

Nice article/interview in The Nation, Tuesday, October 16th, on "Paintings from the Bangkok Night" show opening at FCCT on Friday October 19th, 7pm.......
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Creatures of the night

by Jim Pollard  - The Nation October 16, 2012

 

Artist Chris Coles focuses on the bright lights and dark pulse of Bangkok's infamous nightlife

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see the appeal of places or things that locals can be blind to. For Chris Coles, an American artist who has lived in Bangkok on and off for more than a decade, the urban jungle is the source of his inspiration.

Coles worked in the movie business for a quarter of a century and travelled widely before buying a condo in Bangkok in the late '90s. He says his time in the film industry, with set designers such as Stuart Craig and filmmakers like Roger Deakins, heightened his appreciation and awareness of the sights he encountered in Southeast Asia.

"It was a real eye-opener the first time coming here - visually dense and the energy here. I got really interested in modern Asia. For a Westerner, it's such a different universe."

Most farang, he says, are not used to all the motion and density they initially encounter in the Thai capital. "Thais are quite relaxed and at ease in a lot of dense visual information - holes in the sidewalk, motorcycles, soi dogs, etc - but it overloads your senses. Most Westerners are not used to that in the first year here."

For Coles, whose mother was an artist, just having a meal or a drink in some notorious nightlife areas can be a rich visual feast. "For an artist, it's like sitting next to Niagara Falls."

He talks about art with passion. He is big on the German expressionists such as Emil Nolde, who painted scenes in Berlin in the 1920s, and sees similarities to modern-day Bangkok, which he rates as "the real capital of Southeast Asia" - a city of multiple cultural streams, great infrastructure, and "tremendous visual intensity".

Coles uses colour with similar boldness - bright, vivid images, with characters and scenes from "the noir side of the Bangkok night".

His book, "Navigating the Bangkok Noir", published last year by Marshall Cavendish, portrays the diverse underbelly of life that makes the capital so spicy and colourful.

He makes it sound like a hot tom yum of all the things conservative locals would stir clear of - as his book says: "bargirls, punters, ladyboys, rentboys, and the assorted cast of thugs, scammers, traffickers, dealers, perverts, hitmen and the endless stream of fugitives from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America, not to mention Thailand itself".

Coles grew up in a fishing village in Maine on the US Atlantic coast. At 17 he caught a bus to Los Angeles on the West Coast and worked in a Mexican restaurant. The following year he was on a pineapple plantation in Hawaii. Shortly after that he was in the West Australian outback, before returning to the US to study literature at Brown University. He journeyed around Kenya before travelling to London, teaching, and then taking a course at Britain's national film school.

In the late '70s he got into the movie business, working as a production manager on the Superman movies with Christopher Reeve.

By 1995, when he came to Phang Nga to work on "Cutthroat Island", he was a studio executive. Directed by Renny Harlin, the movie starring Geena Davis and Matthew Modine was the biggest bomb in box-office history, but it got him to Thailand.

With less interest in films, and his daughter then at university, he was free to pursue his interest in art and live in Thailand.

Coles graduated from sketching to painting after doing art courses at the Otis School in Los Angeles in 2002. He now paints about eight hours a day at a studio off lower Sukhumvit Road.

"A lot of what I'm doing is coming out of the German expressionist style and out of Nolde," he says. "I paint all day, have lunch or dinner on the street or at a food court, and maybe go to the gym. At 10pm I'm finished and wander around for a couple of hours. I might go to Saphan Taksin, Sukhumvit, Ekamai or get the Skytrain somewhere."

What amazes him is the variety of people one can meet - and paint - here. He talks of sitting and deconstructing a scene while having a bowl of noodles on the sidewalk.

When painting, he likes to use strange lighting and will often focus on a person's face.

"I'm interested in what the face hides that's within, and how the same person in the day, during the Bangkok night suddenly they're something else - like someone set them on fire."

MEET THE MAN

Coles will feature new works in a show at the Foreign Correspondents Club, opening on Friday at 7pm.

Philip Cornwel-Smith, the author of "Very Thai", will give a short introductory talk about how Bangkok's nightlife has been an inspiration for many artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians.

For more details, see www.FCCThai.com

http://nationmultimedia.com/life/Creatures-of-the-night-30192373.html