Chiang Mai portrait painters
Thailand is full of artists and art vendors
Chiang Mai’s Night Bazaar is one of the city’s top attractions. It is the perfect place to purchase cheap goodies like silk, hand crafts, silver, clothes, CDs, DVDs and a lot of other great gifts and souvenirs. It’s also a good place to get your portrait sketched by talented artists for a very reasonable price.
When strolling around you will notice many artists offering to paint your portrait. You’ll find them scattered all over the place but the best of them are to be found in the Vieng Ping Night Bazaar Building. It is really interesting to see how meticulously they paint the charcoal portraits right on site.
The majority of the artists are recognisable by their long hair and more casual way of behaviour. The subjects they paint vary from tribal people, photos of famous pop stars like Bob Marley and the Beatles, to award winning photographs like the scared looking Afghan girl with the piercing green eyes that appeared in the National Geographic magazine and has been sketched the world over ever since!
If you really want to have an everlasting great souvenir from the Night Bazaar you should to select and bring along your most precious picture. The reproductions the artists make are usually brilliant pieces of art. Or, if you have the time, you can simply sit there and pose for a few hours.
Some painters offer very low prices, but beware because most likely they didn’t go to art school or have just started their art school education, so when they have finished a painting job the quality is lacking and it is hard to refuse to pay for the work when it’s finished.
My Thai neighbour, Suriyan, enjoyed four years of training on Bangkok’s Thai Wichit Art School. He told me that he’s very annoyed by the many pretender artists trying to get portrait painting assignments. After all, they undermine the work of the real experts, he says. He once immortalised my girlfriend and I on paper and he really did a superb job. The painting could be a copy of the photo he used to make the portrait, it’s so accurate.
If you decide to have one of your favourite pictures reproduced I recommend you’ll head to the lower floor of the Night Bazaar Arcade. The building is a hard to miss and you can enter it from the front and the back side. Here you will find a big painting and drawing shop which has about seven artists working in it.
Ask for Suriyan as he enjoyed the four years of training at Thai Wichit Art School and he’s a truly genuine well skilled artist with 10 years of painting experience (An example of his work accompanies this article).
Paintings can be made in black and white, pastels or oil colour. The prices depend on how many persons need to be painted and the size of the work. For example a black and white, 28 X 38cm painting with one person on it will cost 1,000 baht while an oil colour, 55 X 65cm, with four persons on it will cost 6,500 baht. Postage by airmail is also offered at a rate of 300 baht.
