Dali House

You have to scoot over Dorseyland to read about cat and elephant paintings (not paintings of them – the animals do the painting) (sort of), but Dali House tries to catch up with this limping tale of Scottish art critics going gaga for one elephant’s self-portraits.

Dali House is in Thailand, where pachyderms are practically on pedestals, though not for their artistic talents. Here, the saga of one unfortunate beast’s demise earlier this month made the news every day for a week, right up until the residents of the village he’d wandered into in Chanthaburi province dug a hole deep enough to bury him and hoisted his sorry 50-year-old carcass in, amid Buddhist chants and many tears (Nation photo).

Elsewhere in the Land of Smiles, elephants were smiling and kicking around a soccer ball to (a) delight the tourists and (b) try in vain to divert Thais from gambling on the World Cup. (AP photo)

And elephants in countries where there are extremely unimaginative newspaper photographers were given cold showers because July was so damn hot, you see, and family newspapers were loathe to run more pictures of girls taking their tops off. (No photo credit for this one because it’s stupid.)

But in Scotland, possibly because of that very heat, art critics were “trumpeting the latest works by a group of Thai elephants”, as the German news agency DPA put it (ha ha ha).

Spectators were “herding” (ha etc) into the Dundas Gallery in Edinburgh to see self-portraits by Paya, “one of six elephants whose keepers have taught them how to hold a paintbrush in their trunks. They drop the brush when they want a new colour.” I think Picasso did that too, late in his career.

“The only thing they can’t do on their own is pick up a paintbrush, so it gets handed to them,” explained admirably clever Thai expatriate Victoria Khunapramot, who studied art history and business management (!) in Scotland.

More elephant paintings if you “must” (ha) here.