(click for video) (click for video) (click for video) (click for video) (click for video) The Bangkok Night Patpong Portraits Bangkok Neon Bangkok Ladyboy Bangkok Noir Bangkok Soi Dog
One Night in Bangkok Bangkok Boys Town Decadent Berlin Intimate Landscapes Landscapes Chris Coles is an artist and filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles and Bangkok, Thailand. His paintings, in the Expressionist style, are jagged emotional portraits, revealing a raw and primitive layer of the human experience. They are part of the Expressionist movement which has its roots in the Germany of the early 1900's. Many of the European Expressionists experienced the slaughter of the First World War at close hand and they often viewed the world as an edgy, dangerous place filled with ill-intention and alienation, mankind directly linked to a primordial past of predatory ancestors roaming primal swamps, forests and plains where bugs, reptiles and animals, the plants and the earth itself were caught up in a constant and endless struggle to devour, reproduce, evolve and survive. The Expressionists often painted their vision with dark lines and clashing colors rather than the soft images and harmonious tones of the Impressionists who preceded them. Their paintings were disconcerting and sometimes offensive, more harsh than pretty. The goal was to prod and wake up rather than induce a state of aesthetique relaxation. The paintings of George Grosz, Emil Nolde, James Ensor, Max Pechstein, Oscar Kokoschka, Alexei von Jawlensky, Egon Schiele, Ernst Kirchner, Max Beckman and Otto Dix often shocked and were sometimes banned. In the 1930's, Hitler ordered many of them destroyed as degrading and degenerate. Along with Stalin, he wanted only positive realist paintings of the ideal and shining man, a sunlit world filled with uplifting thoughts. In their way of thinking, the actual brutality of their lives, actions and times was not a proper subject for art. But almost a hundred years later, the insight and brilliance of the Expressionist vision lives on, true to the ongoing struggle and clash of human existence on a planet in constant and violent transformation, expressed in strong colors and distorted lines, swirling patterns, allowing us a glimpse into the true nature of our lives and our world as they actually are, not as we would wish them to be. Click here to watch some music videos of Chris Coles Bangkok paintings. To contact Chris Coles, email him at: ChrisIPS@aol.com
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