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When Elephants Paint
Vitally Komar & Alexander Melamid, with Mia Fineman
Perennial Books (Harper Collins) 2001, New York.
Price R164-95 (available from good bookstores, or on-line at www.kalahari.net or www.amazon.com)
ISBN: 0-06-095352-7
265x250mm, paperback, 101 pages
This has to be the most bizarre book that I've ever been called upon to review. Here we have two eccentric Russian artists - Komar and Melamid - dreaming up what to many (perhaps even themselves) was by all accounts, a complete whimsy.
Since logging was banned in Thailand in 1990, the elephants which were used in the industry and revered as both living gods and beasts of burden, had nothing more to do. Without proper care or attention, they were dying in alarming numbers and many of them were reduced to performing tricks for tourists.
Komar and Melamid taught the elephants - already adept at moving timber and performing a myriad of other tasks with their prehensile trunks - how to hold paint brushes and apply paint to canvass. This 'pachyderm painting' - achingly close in style to the work of renowned abstract impressionists Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline - soon took on a life of its own and art schools for elephants were established in different parts of the country. Some of the more practised elephants took on the role of teachers themselves. Distinct styles of painting were evident among different groups of elephants although this may have more to do with Komar and Melamid's imaginative interpretation - or one elephant setting a trend that others mimicked - than anything else.
To the astonishment of everyone who had got wind of this initiative, the interest in the elephant art led to exhibitions and even auctions at Christie's which generated enough funds to provide proper care for the elephants and support for their trainers.
The book itself is a striking visual journey - we follow the off-beat artists through Thailand's jungles and see the developing style of elephant paintings.
If ever you wanted a book to broaden your horizons this has to be it. Whether hoax or not, the project has managed to help a group of animals, in a particular place, that were previously in grave danger. Now that can't be bad, can it?
Posted: Mammals by CC Africa, Date: 22 November 2006
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