Supmanee Chaisansuk
Supmanee Chaisansuk is a sustainable architect who lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand. She is currently working as a full time artist and is inspired by the environments she is surrounded by. I thought she would be an appropriate artist to study, because of her stance on air pollution in the natural and urban environment. she has produced many artworks that have been a reflection of the unsustainable and dangerous air quality found in Bangkok. She released a statement of her opinions on her website:
“My concept of artwork is inspired from nature because of my experiences. My home is a local house located in the central business district of Bangkok and surrounded by a naturally green area and ecology which cultivates my desire to appreciate the beauty of nature. I always favor to zoom in on patterns of wildlife such as trees, herbs, fungus, stone, flowers, small creatures, etc. I feel a peaceful mind and impressed when I look at the gorgeous life, so they are my source of art inspiration. Water media technique has been my method for creating my art since I was young coming from watercolor because of the sense of nature flowing and free of color and water movement . This approach creates semi-abstract styles as experiments which link natural pattern colors and mind by paint from imagination and subconsciousness to communicate feelings with environments..”
“People around the world have been concerned about air quality for a decade, but Thai people only became aware of air quality a few years ago due to the PM 2.5 problem. I have been interested in air quality for years because I carried out research about healthy home environments and discovered that air quality was one of the most important factors. While we can control the air quality inside our homes, by choosing the right materials and air conditioning systems, we can't control the air outside,"
With these concerns and ideas, Supmanee Chaisansuk produced the famous "Take Care of Yourself", which is a six-mix media artwork that voices how she feels about air pollution. Supmanee Chaisansuk was inspired to produce this, from her attitudes towards biology and nature and how it can be corrupted. This is evident in the painting, since you can see how the aspects can be inspired by the cells of living organisms. However, the darker colours are visually corrupting the lighter shades of green, which connotes the idea of pollution killing the natural environment.
After studying her expressive style and deep concerns with air pollution, I have produced primary source photos that reflect the fluid and dramatic colours present in her paintings. From these primary source photos, I have also been able to produce various media experiments that explore my own attitudes towards air pollution. To either view the photos or paintings i did in response to Supmanee Chaisansuk, or go back to the 'Artist Research' screen, click on the appropriate button to the right.
To recreate Supmanee Chaisansuk's expressive style, i took a series of primary source photographs that show ink being dropped into water. I took these photographs to see how a substance of a different density moves through an environment, which helped inform my understanding of the motion of smoke through the air. These primary source photographs can be found on this website, with explanations as to why i selected and combined certain colours and the overall effect this had. The significance of these photos, is that i was able to create these responses based on the movement and colour blending that i recorded in my photographs. To the left is a representation of how the ink initially passed through the water as it dripped down before bleeding out. Moreover the experiment below demonstrates how certain colours blend together and result in new colours being formed, which both connotes how air pollution physically changes the appearance of an area, as well as corrupting it as shown by the darker colours impacting the lighter colours. These experiments each explore different aspects of air pollution and its impacts.
To the left is a larger ink experiment that i did, which was created with the intent of showing how different colours move and blend together in a larger body. I chose to use these colours, as similar to my JMW Turner painting, these colours are predominantly found in fires and the smoke produced by those fires. Therefore those initial three ink experiments each explored the movement of ink and the interaction of colours which overall helped inform my understanding of how to present air pollution effectively.
Below is a separate series of experiments that i produced which were not informed by my primary source photos, but were informed by my artist research on Supmanee Chaisansuk. Similar to the previous series of experiments, these were also created to explore the movement of air pollution and the colours that most effectively represent it. These colours are darker which makes them more cheerless, however i think the previous colour pallet was a more impactful representation of air pollution.
