Of creativity and catharsis

Ragamuffins to benefit from art auction.

A white pigeon flutters free, liberated from its cage by a girl with long raven hair. A small boy wearing a blue and yellow baseball cap waves his arms in delight as a butterfly beats its wings in the wind.

A couple engage in a mock dog fight with a fleet of paper aeroplanes. Self-taught Indonesian painter Mohammad Toha Hasan, the man behind these rich, colour- saturated acrylic creations, is one of several artists whose work features in a silent art auction this week. Life Creative: The Meaning of Love is hosted by arts therapy organisation The Ragamuffin Project.

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Picking up the pieces

Full Circle is an unusual artwork: a durational performance piece which will challenge and transfix both artist and audience. For six consecutive days, Amy Lee Sanford will sit amid a circle of 40 Kompong Chhang clay pots. Slowly and deliberately, she will break one pot by dropping it on the floor. She will then gather the pieces and meticulously glue the pot back together, binding the fragments with string and returning the remade pot to the circle. Over six days, all 40 pots will be broken and remade in this way.

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An artist rises from the ashes

Srey Bandaul has come a long way since he first picked up a paint brush at the SiteTwo Refugee camp on the Thai border. Spooked by personal experience of fleeing the murderous Khmer Rouge, the 38-year-old has turned memories of a traumatic past into a promising artistic future.

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Ngwe Phyo exhibits new drip paintings

FORTY acrylic paintings by Ngwe Phyo, most of them created using an experimental dripping technique, are on exhibit at Gallery 65 in Yangon from January 28 to February 3.

Ngwe Phyo, 23, said he received early training in basic drawing from his father, U Ngwe Aung, and developed his skills further under artists U Mon Thet and U Ko Maung Kyaw Than.

In 2006 Ngwe Phyo graduated from the State School of Fine Arts, initially focusing on realism in his paintings.

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