Paw Oo Thet

Paw Oo Thet ပေါ်ဦးသက်
Paw Oo Thet
Born	Paw Oo 1936 Mandalay, British Burma
Died	13 April 1993 (aged 57) Mandalay, Myanmar
Nationality	Burmese
Education	Apprentice to Ba Thet, Famous Artists School (Correspondence Course, USA)
Known for	Painting
Movement	Mandalay School

Paw Oo Thet (Burmese: ပေါ်ဦးသက်, pronounced: [pɔ̀ ʔù θɛʔ]; 1936 – 13 April 1993) was a Burmese painter, prominent in the Mandalay art scene who became one of the initiators of a modernistic art movement in Burma in the early 1960s.

Paw Oo Thet was born in 1936 in Mandalay, son of an artist who taught art in a public school. He lost his mother when he was young, and was brought up by his father, who taught him to draw and paint. At the age of twelve, shortly after the end of World War II, he lost his right hand while playing with a hand grenade and was forced to learn to write and draw with his left hand. As a school student, he won many prizes in art competitions and participated in some exhibitions, but he did not acquire an education beyond high school. He and Win Pe, both born in the same year, studied under Ba Thet, who sent the two young artists to Kin Maung (Bank) (c. 1908−83) to learn about modernistic, more abstract art trends. Both Paw Oo Thet and Win Pe embraced such trends.

By the age of twenty-one, Paw Oo Thet was earning enough to make a living from his art as an illustrator and cartoonist in local magazines and newspapers, including the People's Daily in Mandalay, The Mirror, and the Working People’s Daily in Yangon. He won a scholarship in 1959 that let him and Win Pe undertake Norman Rockwell's correspondence course, the Famous Artists School, in the United States. The exposure to the work of Dong Kingman, the Chinese-American watercolorist, often described as an impressionist and who was one of the instructors of the Famous Artists School, influenced both Paw Oo Thet and Win Pe in a large way. In the case of Paw Oo Thet, Kingman's influence carried over in Paw Oo Thet's vibrant use of color, which was a refreshing change in Burmese arts for much Burmese painting until then was characterized by somber and subdued coloring, and in oil painting, heavy and dark use of chiaroscuro, acquired from the style of Ba Nyan.

...
Wikipedia