3. Chit-Chat with the Curator: How it all began

My husband and I never  intended to collect art.  In university we had taken an evening elective called “Decorative Arts” because both our colleges (mine Communication, his Business Administration) accepted it for credit and we could be in the same class for summer! We also thought it would be easy (but it was not!). What we did discover was this shared interest in pretty things and we started a habit of browsing in galleries wherever we found them.  

Skip forward to our move with into a new house with many empty white walls (1980).  We moved to Pravet before Srinakarind Road was built, so my husband’s daily commute took him past Petchburi Gallery on New Petchburi Road. When I asked him what he wanted for Christmas that year, he told me  he wanted the painting that  he looked at everyday when he was stuck at the red light! 

My gift to him was our first purchase of a proper oil painting. It was Pak Prung Lily by an artist named Noparat Livisiddhi, who has since become one of our favourite artists.  

Later on, when our house was still looking very empty, we came across the works of Sa-ad Thanomwongse displayed on so many walls of the Felix Hotel in Rajprasong. We loved his work with his signature style: lotus flowers, exquisite water droplets rolling on the lotus leaves and a dragon fly always hovering above the petals. We copied down his name and tried to track him down.  In those days we had to use the telephone book not Google!  We looked in the English White Pages and Yellow Pages and found his number there!  

A quick call from my husband got us an appointment to meet at his studio in Ban Bua Thong (considered an artist’s colony” in those days).  We drove to his house, and explained that we needed a BIG painting to cover our bare living room wall, but we wanted his same iconic lotus pond style.  He kindly accepted the commission to paint Lotus Pond “special order to size” for us, and then  suggested we walk next door to meet another artist, his friend Noparat Livisiddhi.  

We hadn’t realised we would be able to meet the very artist who had inspired our first purchase too!  So we commissioned some pieces from him that day in 1980 : Sunflowers, which hung on our dining room for years,  Morning Bloom which hung in my office at Sasin, and Field of Poppies which hung in our eldest child’s room.  In the next few years we saw his work displayed in many galleries downtown and by 2000 we acquired the very BIG Maple Leaves in Autumn from Sombat Gallery at the Sheraton Hotel . We saw it being unloaded from the delivery truck and went in to the gallery to buy it! It hung in our bedroom for years, to remind us of our happy times in New England.

Now we hope that these treasures, the core of our collection, can be restored before they crumble into dust!