Kosei Gallimore

The pleasure of being, eating and dying was created by a Thai artist Montein Boonma around the 1980s. This artwork looks at the cycle of birth, death and rebirth. This artwork also focuses on death as he experienced it when his wife died of cancer prior to his artwork. I learnt that Martin Boonma used materials that are not usually used in Art; he used materials like Bowls, chopsticks and napkins. He enjoyed creating unique types of drawings, exploring with a lot of objects we still use today.

I enjoyed looking at his artwork of the bowls and converting it to a painting. He used bones for chopsticks and I applied this idea as my last layer of my painting. The different types of wiggles are used to show death and all the people in it. This is also based on how Boonma explored with wiggles in his drawings. The precise details used by Boonma were few. However, he made it look clear and showed how life in a nutshell was. One of the many things I admire of his work was how he had so many ideas and put them together, of course they all were so similar. When Martin did this artwork he included on the bowl, teeth, bones and jaws. These features are apparently referred to the problems of consumption for survival, the fragility of life and death.

I used these numbers as they were a sign of death. Boonma wants to show death as normal and is part of the cycle of life and that a bowl is similar to a man’s life. Boonma himself in an interview, says: “the bowl series was developed from a saying by Buddha. The nature of a clay bowl, like that of an animals life, is impermanent. ‘The pot or bowl is like the human body.’ I think of the clay bowl as a metaphor for the human body. The bowl that symbolises the eating habits of humans.”

The layout of the painting reflects the idea that death is always there, as there are wiggles all other the main art piece. Life is shown by the big wiggle, and the small ones - death - are coming to strangle it. I had this idea as Boonma focused on the idea of how it was inevitable. I used the stencils for the numbers, you may ask why I chose yellow? I used yellow as it stands out it is not black as it is not misery. Black is the misery and yellow is the sign of brightness. We do not now why Boonma chose this way, but we know that he did not think that death was bad. For the main artwork I used poster paint, I drew my art piece on cardboard as it solid and strong. The red as the background had a strong affects as it was the symbols of being eating and dying. Martin Boonma’s artwork had lots of red in it thus the background. The reason why I used brown was because it was clear, and the white gave a good foreground. The story on how Martin created this artwork is very exciting and interesting, after a sad time of him losing his wife he had the guts to pull off a good artwork.