Somsong

After having dinner in the Art of Eating garden of the Cicada Market, Madeleine and I made our way to the Art of Art zone of this unique and classy flea market with style. We were strolling along admiring some of the paintings, sculptures and various art works, when we both stopped in our tracks and gazed at this one tableau of the Thai Grand Palace with three monks walking towards it. We immediately and intuitively connected with this piece of art and in unison both enthusiastically said ‘That’s it!’.  For me, it was as if God had spoken to me and said ‘Raymond, like man, you just gotta buy this painting!’ Seriously, that’s what She/He said. Happens to me all the time, it's called intuition.

Every place we’ve lived in the world, we have sought and purchased one memento of our temporary adopted homeland. There are times when the search for a keepsake was long, but, in the end we've always managed to find something that 'spoke' to us both. With time, we have become very selective in our purchases, especially knowing that as our lives as wandering expats unfolds and our cache of souvenirs grows, there is just so much space (floor or wall) left in our house in Vancouver to display or hang our keepsakes. So, whatever memento we do decide to purchase and bring back, it has to be the ONE. We do not collect junk; we stopped doing that some time ago. As a matter of fact, as we mature (aka - become old farts) we’ve both entered the decrapifying stage of our lives when we simply keep the things in our lives that we use and actually matter to us. Not that we are going ultra-minimalist here, and we are under no pretence of becoming super non-materialistic anti-capitalistic snobs. We still love things and money, a lot. 

However, we have made and continue to make a concentrated effort to only keep the things in our lives that matter to us. Besides, who’s going to end up having to clean up after us once we make the final move off good old Mother Earth? I don’t want to burden anyone with rummaging through my junky accoutrements and sending them off to Value Village. I rather do that myself.  With time, we seem to be more and more content with less and less. This minimalist approach to our lives has given us a certain freedom from being bogged down with too much ‘stuff’ and getting rid of some of it represents a gratifying cleansing of sorts. One of the highlights of my summers back home is when we clean out our storage locker. I actually get excited thinking of this annual purge of Locker 341, when we end up disposing of a lot of gently used artifacts (why on earth do we need 7 salad spinners?). 

As much as cleaning out my storage locker may turn me on, so does minimalist art, which brings me back to the subject of this blog entry, the tableau that I somehow got angelically swayed into purchasing. I have always appreciated this style of minimalist art in which the simplest and fewest elements are used to create the maximum effect.  This is why this particular piece of art stirred something inside of me to a point where divine intervention persuaded me to buy it.
  

We struck up a conversation with the artist who had created this work of art that had so impressed us. Somsong explained her life journey which led her to display her work at an open air market. For some reason, this petite lady immediately took a liking to Madeleine (both kindred spirits I figure) and proceeded to expound in painstakingly minute details of how she had succeeded in creating the quasi-three dimensional technique of her work (something about simply adding layers of paint every other day…). 

Whether this was an act of God or not, this one particular painting struck us as ‘the One’ from Thailand.  We have our Thailand keepsake.