Phaptawan Suwannakudt received her training, not in the academy, but over a difficult twelve-year apprenticeship to her father , the renowned mural artist Paiboon Suwanannakudt or Tan Kudt. Since his death she has achieved something like celebrity status in her own right in Thailand for her leadership of the Tan Kudt Group which, under her direction, has carried out a number of prestigious temple and hotel mural projects, and has enjoyed the patronage of, amongst others, the Thai Crown Princess.
The works on canvas, silk and tracing paper exhibited at Sherman Galleries Hargrave leave us in no doubt that Suwannakudt is a masterful inheritor of the tradition of Thai sacred art. All of the works take Buddhist allegories as their subject matter, and strongly reference the artist's practice as a temple painter. This is true particularly of the monumental Buddha's Lives and His Enlightenment Screen, which is a scaled-down version of a temple mural scheme. A viewing of Suwannakudt's work is not limited however to the esoteric pleasures of an iconographic reading. In her hands the form and content of traditional Thai devotional art do not ossify, but are subject to an innovation and critical reinterpretation which make her work anything but static.
Relegated as a novice to washing brushes and palettes, Suwannakudt found her first creative outlet in clandestine experiments with colour. Here she was perhaps inspired by her father, who had refused to be bound by the conventional wisdom regarding the juxtaposition of colours. Tan Kudt found his paints in unusual places, at one stage using car paint pigments bought in Bangkok's Chinatown. We should not be surprised then that Phaptawan Suwannakudt's palette references not a staid traditionalism