The Secret Garden Painting

Prasong Kantanee Born in Chiang Mai, Thailand Education: B.A. in Business Administration at Strayer University, Washington DC, USA Although my academic study had nothing to do with Arts, my main interest in life has always been about Arts. Illustrating my imagination on paper and canvas as drawings or paintings has been my obsession. Ever since I was young I found myself drawing human bodies and a few times I got even caught in class during lecture by my teachers. Of course, they made fun of me since I drew mostly naked bodies, but that did not stop my passion for Arts at all. Later I finally got the chance of taking a summer class of Intensive Figure Drawing with live nude models at the National Cathedral of Washington DC. It was not really a class about teaching how to draw, but more of letting us draw and then share the result with our class mates. Doing this we could learn how the same object can be interpreted on paper in many ways by different artists and different styles of drawings, some more abstract, some more realistic. It was the first time in my life that I had the chance to draw live models. It was rather interesting for me to discover that live models give a much better perspective for the drawing of the human body than drawing from imagination only. It is fair to say that this was a turning point for me and my interest in Arts and I became rather obsessive with it. My Career as an Antique Dealer has given me a very good opportunity to get more knowledge of fine Arts as I attend often auctions and I also receive frequently auctions catalogues which often contain elaborated description of Old Master paintings as well as story and history behind them. A lot of times I am surprised to see what kind of motives, painters and history exist that I have never heard about and they are really amazing wonderful masterpieces and not less quality than those world most famous paintings and artists . From this, my knowledge of Arts and history grows even more. Since 2007 I have begun using camera images instead of my own mirror image working with self timer features to make varieties of photographs of me for my paintings. This method allows me to use different angles and a variety of lighting effects as well. I added set decorations that work for my motives and themes, sometimes in the form of collages which I can store as a complete set of requisites of my paintings.