Alex Soulsby

'I have found Chiang Mai to be a city in a constant state of flux,' said Alex Soulsby, artist and head of fine arts at Lanna International School. 'People are coming and going all the time, from and to all parts of the world, and you notice it more living here as the community is quite tightly knit.' 'It has fascinated me meeting people in this melting pot in the north of Thailand and I have enjoyed studying them over the past four years.'Alex Soulsby is a twenty six year old from Winchester, England.His four years in Chiang Mai are drawing to a close.He is moving on.However, his experiences here have been carefully crafted and personally expressed into a collection of artworks, which he will be exhibiting in early June. Soulsby graduated from Coventry University with a BA Honours in Fine Art.His specialty was stone carving, sound manipulation and filmmaking - very cutting edge forms of artistic expressions.Upon graduation, Soulsby worked with the contemporary British sculptor David Nash on a project in Warwick where he had the chance to use the sculpture and audio landscaping forms of art, both of which he had studied.Soulsby then returned to Winchester where he taught art for a period of time before applying for a job in Chiang Mai where he has been living ever since.'When I first moved to Chiang Mai I was somewhat frustrated by the lack of availability of artistic equipment for my profession as well as a lack of an artistic community to exchange ideas with,' said Soulsby. 'I found myself needing to express myself artistically, but not being able to do so as I didn't have my carving tools or video and sound equipment.I therefore began to paint.When I was at art college I used to resent being forced to paint or draw; I found it tedious and not to my liking, preferring to work in three-dimensional forms.However, once I began to explore traditional mediums, such as pencil, charcoal, acrylic, enamel and oil, I found myself making the fascinating transition back from three-dimensional art to two - kind of like regressing to progress if you like.All the old resentment vanished and I began to respect these mediums and learn and evolve as an artist with them.'In 2000, while on holiday in Koh Lanta, Soulsby met Sasha Constable, great great great granddaughter of John Constable, the Suffolk painter ranked with Turner as one of Britain's greatest landscape artists.
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This has encouraged Soulsby to do more work and also to bring his stone carving tools from England so that he can continue in his art form of choice. 'As I said, I think Chiang Mai is a fascinating melting pot,' continued Soulsby. 'My work over the past year has been extremely personal.It has been highly influenced by Chiang Mai but not in a traditional way.I have not been directly influenced by local forms of art or craft, or by temples or even the culture, it's not as obvious as that.Instead I have found the subtleties of smells, sights and sounds to be the most pervasive influences - and of course the people I have met.People have the most interesting reasons for coming to Chiang Mai.It's a great eclectic mix of the interesting and the sick; people running away from or running towards something.
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Alex Soulsby's first solo exhibition will be held as a reopening of this gallery and interested parties are invited to come along and view, purchase the works of art or discuss them with Soulsby. "Places I've Been, Faces I've Seen" will be held between 8th-18th of June at HQ Gallery on Singharat road just diagonally opposite Wat Phra Singh.For more information about the gallery and the exhibition please visit www.hqartgallery.com, ail: sales@hqartgallery.com, or call (66) 53 814 717-8 and fax (66) 53 814 719.

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