About

‘Dark and Muddy’

ေနာက္က်ိက်ိျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ အေမွာင္ေတြ

The words above are to describe late Artist Min Kyi’s art. To be exact, his brown and grey tones are unique and distinct - his works are murky, dark and depressing. One famous artist from Myanmar once said like this: “When you look at his paintings, you will see so many colors mixed into the artwork. He is one of two artists in Myanmar who could do that”.

အထက္က စကားလံုးေတြဟာ ကြယ္လြန္ခဲ့ၿပီျဖစ္တဲ့ ပန္းခ်ီဆရာမင္းၾကည္ရဲ႕လက္ရာေတြကို ကုိယ္စားျပဳပါတယ္။ အတိအက်ေျပာရရင္ သူ အသံုးျပဳတဲ့ အညိဳနဲ႔မီးခိုးေရာင္အႏုအရင့္ဟန္က တစ္မူထူးၿပီး ကြဲထြက္ေနတယ္။ သူ႔လက္ရာေတြက မိႈင္းတယ္၊ အေမွာင္မ်ားတယ္၊ စိတ္ဓာတ္က်စရာ ေကာင္းတယ္။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံရဲ႕နာမည္ေက်ာ္ပန္းခ်ီဆရာတစ္ေယာက္က တစ္ခါက အခုလိုေျပာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ “မင္းၾကည္ရဲ႕ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြကို ၾကည့္ရင္၊ လက္ရာတစ္ခုတည္းမွာ အေရာင္အမ်ားႀကီးကို ေရာေႏွာထည့္ထားတာ ေတြ႔ရလိမ့္မယ္။ ျမန္မာျပည္က ဒီလိုဆြဲႏုိင္တဲ့ ပန္းခ်ီဆရာႏွစ္ေယာက္ထဲမွာ သူက တစ္ေယာက္အပါအ၀င္ပါပဲ”

But Min Kyi had had a hard life like many others in Myanmar those days. He was born in 1940 to a farming family of a small village. In those days in Myanmar, there was civil war occurring throughout the country. His father was accused of being an informer by the rebels and vanished from the family. Min Kyi studied at a monastery for elementary education. He showed his early love for art. In 1955, while he was in middle school, he met two famous artists and studied the fundamentals until 1958. He also learnt on perspectives and outdoors-painting by copying works of famous European artists. This was the time when his passion for art was fully materialized under those influences.

မင္းၾကည္ဟာ အဲဒီေခတ္ကာလက ျမန္မာျပည္မွာေနခဲ့ၾကတဲ့လူေတြလိုပဲ ခက္ခဲၾကမ္းတမ္းတဲ့ဘ၀ကို ျဖတ္သန္းခဲ့ရတယ္။ သူဟာ ၁၉၄၀ ခုႏွစ္မွာ လယ္သမားမိသားစုတစ္ခုကေန ေမြးဖြားခဲ့တာပါ။ အဲဒီအခ်ိန္က ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအႏွံ႔မွာ ျပည္တြင္းစစ္ျဖစ္ေနခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူ႔အေဖကို လည္း ေတာခိုသူပုန္ေတြက အစိုးရသတင္းေပးအျဖစ္ စြပ္စြဲတဲ့အတြက္၊ ႐ြာကေန ေပ်ာက္ကြယ္သြားခဲ့တယ္။ မင္းၾကည္ဟာ ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္းမွာပဲ ေက်ာင္းစေနခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ သူ႔အႏုပညာဗီဇကေတာ့ ငယ္ငယ္ကတည္းက ျပခဲ့တယ္။ ဒီလိုနဲ႔ သူ အလယ္တန္းတက္ ခ်ိန္ ၁၉၅၅ ခုႏွစ္မွာ နာမည္ေက်ာ္ပန္းခ်ီဆရာႀကီးႏွစ္ေယာက္နဲ႔ဆံုမိၿပီး၊ ပန္းခ်ီအေျခခံသေဘာေတြကို ၁၉၅၈ ခုအထိ သင္ယူတယ္။ သူဟာ ဥေရာပက အထင္ကရပန္းခ်ီဆရာႀကီးေတြရဲ႕လက္ရာေတြကို ပံုတူလုိက္ဆြဲရင္း၊ ‘ အျမင္ေရးဆြဲနည္း’ ၊ ‘ ေအာက္ဒိုးေရးနည္း’ ေတြကိုလည္း ေလ့လာခဲ့တယ္။ သူ႔အေပၚ အဲဒီလိုလႊမ္းမိုးမႈေတြနဲ႔အတူ၊ ပန္းခ်ီအႏုပညာအေပၚ ျမတ္ႏုိးမႈေတြက သူ႔ဆီမွာ အျပည့္အ၀ အေကာင္အထည္ေပၚလာခဲ့တာပါပဲ။

Min Kyi worked as a public servant at the then Trade Ministry. It was 1965. He married two times: he lost his first wife because he quit his job and chose a life of painting fulltime, but met his second wife who completely understood him. Min Kyi faced great difficulties during that time – he had to peddle his works and draw car number plates.

မင္းၾကည္ဟာ အဲဒီေခတ္က ကုန္သြယ္ေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနမွာ ၀န္ထမ္းလုပ္ခဲ့တယ္။ ၁၉၆၅ ခုႏွစ္ကာလ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ သူ အိမ္ေထာင္ႏွစ္ ဆက္က်ခဲ့တယ္။ ပံုမွန္အစိုးရအလုပ္ကိုထြက္ၿပီး၊ အခ်ိန္ျပည့္ပန္းခ်ီဆြဲတဲ့ဘ၀ကို ေ႐ြးခဲ့လို႔ ပထမဇနီးနဲ႔ကြဲပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ဒုတိယေျမာက္ ဇနီးကေတာ့ သူ႔အေပၚ နားလည္မႈအျပည့္႐ွိခဲ့တယ္။ အဲဒီကာလေတြအတြင္းမွာ မင္းၾကည္ဟာ အခက္အခဲေတြအမ်ားအျပားၾကံဳခဲ့ပါ ေသးတယ္။ သူ႔ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြကို သူကုိယ္တုိင္ ေနရာအႏွံ႔လုိက္ေရာင္းရတယ္။ ၀မ္းစာအတြက္ ကားနံပါတ္ေတြ ေရးရတယ္။

Min Kyi got moderate success and recognition from his peers in the seventies, and gradually his paintings were sold out and he also started to gain recognition from international buyers.

၇၀ ခုႏွစ္ေတြမွာေတာ့ သူ႔အတြက္ ေအာင္ျမင္မႈအသင့္အတင့္ရလာတဲ့အျပင္၊ သူနဲ႔ေခတ္ၿပိဳင္ေတြဆီက အသိအမွတ္ျပဳတာကိုလည္း ရခဲ့တယ္။ သူ႔ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြလည္း တျဖည္းျဖည္းနဲ႔ေရာင္းလာရၿပီး၊ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ၀ယ္လက္ေတြရဲ႕အသိအမွတ္ျပဳမႈကိုလည္း စရလာ တယ္။

In 2004, he was found out having cancer, and had to sell his private collections for his medical bills. Min Kyi passed away before he could make his solo exhibition.

၂၀၀၄ ခုႏွစ္မွာေတာ့ သူ႔မွာ ကင္ဆာ႐ွိေနေၾကာင္းေတြ႔ခဲ့ရတယ္။ ေဆးကုစရိတ္အတြက္ သူကုိယ္တုိင္စုေဆာင္းထားတဲ့ ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြ ကို ထုတ္ေရာင္းခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ မင္းၾကည္ဟာ တစ္ကုိယ္ေတာ္ျပပြဲ မလုပ္ႏုိင္ခင္မွာပဲ ကြယ္လြန္ခဲ့ရ႐ွာတာပါ။

Despite leading the difficult life, Min Kyi never compromised on his principles or his paintings. Though many works were painted outdoors, his paintings were dark and subdued in colors. He believed that colors deceived the viewer and wanted to remain sincere in his interpretation of what he saw. Min Kyi’s strange behavior was that he did not like to wash his brushes – he liked to use brushes with 3-day-old paints to achieve his preferred colors.

မင္းၾကည္ဟာ ၾကမ္းတမ္းတဲ့ဘ၀ကိုေ႐ြးခ်ယ္ခဲ့ရေပမယ့္၊ သူ႔လက္ရာ၊ သူ႔အယူအဆနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ရင္ လံုး၀အေလွ်ာ့မေပးခဲ့ဘူး။ သူ႔လက္ ရာအမ်ားအျပားကို ေအာက္ဒိုးဆြဲခဲ့ေပမယ့္၊ သူ႔ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြမွာ အေမွာင္မ်ားတာမ်ိဳး၊ အေရာင္ေတြကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားတာမ်ိဳးေတြခ်ည္း ပါပဲ။ အေရာင္ေတြက ၾကည့္သူအျမင္ကို လွည့္စားတတ္တယ္လို႔ သူက ယံုၾကည္တယ္။ သူ ျမင္တဲ့အရာေတြအေပၚ သူ႔ဘာသာ အဓိပၸာယ္ေဖာ္မႈမွာ သူက အျမဲတမ္းစစ္မွန္ခ်င္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ မင္းၾကည္ရဲ႕ဆန္းတဲ့အေလ့အထတစ္ခုကေတာ့ ပန္းခ်ီဆြဲစုတ္တံေတြကို ေရေဆးတာ မႀကိဳက္ဘူး။ ေဆးက်န္ေတြ သံုးရက္စာေလာက္႐ွိေနတဲ့ စုတ္တံေတြကိုပဲ သံုးတယ္။ ဒါမွ သူ႔စိတ္ႀကိဳက္အေရာင္ေတြကို ရတယ္လို႔ဆိုတယ္။

In fact, it may be said that Min Kyi’s works were true reflections of Myanmar in those days. An artist said about him beautifully – “The truth is not always as beautiful and Min Kyi was a very honest artist”.

တကယ္ေတာ့ မင္းၾကည္ရဲ႕လက္ရာေတြဟာ အဲဒီကာလက ျမန္မာျပည္ရဲ႕ပံုရိပ္မွန္ေတြကို ထင္ဟပ္ျပသလိုပဲလို႔ဆိုႏုိင္ပါတယ္။ ပန္းခ်ီဆ ရာတစ္ေယာက္က သူ႔အေၾကာင္းကို အလွဆံုးေျပာခဲ့ဖူးပါတယ္။ “ အမွန္တရားဆိုတာ အျမဲတမ္းမလွပါဘူး။ မင္းၾကည္ကေတာ့ သိပ္ကို ႐ိုးသားတဲ့ပန္းခ်ီဆရာတစ္ေယာက္ပဲေလ” လို႔ေျပာခဲ့တာပါ။

Min Kyi (1940-2008)

မင္းၾကည္ (၁၉၄၀-၂၀၀၈)

Min Kyi was born in 1940 to a farming family, and he grew up in a village called Khamauksuu from the area of Nivana, Hinthada district.

မင္းၾကည္ကို ၁၉၄၀ ခုႏွစ္မွာ သာမန္လယ္သမားမိသားစုတစ္ခုကေန ေမြးဖြားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဟသၤာတခ႐ုိင္၊ နိဗၺာန္နယ္ဇာတိ ျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ ခေမာက္စုလို႔ေခၚတဲ့႐ြာေလးမွာ ႀကီးျပင္းခဲ့တယ္။

In those days, there were civil wars occurring throughout Myanmar. Like in the stories of many other families, his father disappeared after a group of rebels accused him of informing on them. Min Kyi had to study at a monastery for elementary education.

အဲဒီေခတ္ကာလဟာ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအႏွံ႔မွာ ျပည္တြင္းစစ္ျဖစ္ပြားေနခ်ိန္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီကာလက မိသားစုေတာ္ ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား ၾကံဳခဲ့ၾကတဲ့အျဖစ္ဆိုးမ်ိဳးကို မင္းၾကည္တို႔မိသားစုလည္း ၾကံဳခဲ့ရတယ္။ သူ႔ဖခင္ျဖစ္သူကို ေတာခိုသူပုန္ေတြက အစိုးရသတင္းေပးအျဖစ္ စြပ္စြဲခဲ့ၾကတာပါ။ သိပ္မၾကာခင္မွာပဲ မင္းၾကည္ရဲ႕အေဖလည္း ႐ြာကေနေပ်ာက္သြားတယ္။ အဲဒီလိုေခတ္မွာ မင္းၾကည္ရဲ႕ဘ၀ကို စခဲ့ပါတယ္။

He showed his love for art since he was little. In 1955, while he was in middle school, he met two famous artists and took a basic art training from them until 1958. He also studied perspective and outdoor-painting by copying the works of famous European artists. Then he attended Yangon University and got a degree in Myanmar language.

မင္းၾကည္ဟာ မူလတန္းပညာေရးကို ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္းမွာပဲ သင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူက အႏုပညာနဲ႔ပတ္သက္တဲ့ဗီဇကို ငယ္ငယ္ေလးကတည္းက ျပခဲ့တယ္လို႔ဆိုတယ္။ ၁၉၅၅ ခုႏွစ္မွာေတာ့ အလယ္တန္းတက္ေနစဥ္မွာပဲ နာမည္႐ွိတဲ့နယ္ခံ ပန္းခ်ီဆရာႏွစ္ေယာက္နဲ႔ ဆံုခြင့္ရခဲ့တယ္။ အေျခခံပန္းခ်ီသေဘာတရားေတြကို အဲဒီဆရာႏွစ္ေယာက္ဆီကေန ၁၉၅၈ ခုႏွစ္အထိ သင္ယူခြင့္ရခဲ့တယ္။ ဒါ့အျပင္ မင္းၾကည္ဟာ နာမည္ေက်ာ္ ဥေရာပပန္းခ်ီဆရာႀကီးေတြရဲ႕လက္ရာေတြကို ပံုစံတူလုိက္ဆြဲရင္း၊ အျမင္ေရးဆြဲနည္းသေဘာနဲ႔ ေအာက္ဒိုးေရးနည္းသေဘာေတြကို ေလ့လာခြင့္ရသလိုျဖစ္ခဲ့ျပန္တယ္။ အဲဒီေနာက္ မင္းၾကည္ဟာ ရန္ကုန္တကၠသိုလ္တက္ခဲ့ၿပီး၊ ျမန္မာစာအဓိကနဲ႔ ဘြဲ႔ရခဲ့ပါတယ္။

Apart from painting, Min Kyi was also a civil servant at the then Department of Trade, working as the manager of a pharmacy warehouse. He married in 1965 and had one daughter. His wife had been known as a beautiful woman in the neighborhood of Tagyitaan, a district she grew up in. However, their marriage ended because of constant fighting between them.

မင္းၾကည္ဟာ ပန္းခ်ီဆရာတစ္ေယာက္ရဲ႕ဘ၀အျပင္၊ အဲဒီအခ်ိန္က ကုန္သြယ္ေရးဌာနမွာလည္း ေဆးဂိုေဒါင္မန္ ေနဂ်ာအျဖစ္နဲ႔ အစိုးရ၀န္ထမ္းဘ၀ကို ျဖတ္သန္းခဲ့ပါေသးတယ္။ ဒီလိုနဲ႔ ၁၉၆၅ မွာ အိမ္ေထာင္က်ၿပီး၊ သမီးတစ္ေယာက္ ရခဲ့တယ္။ သူ႔ဇနီးဟာ သူတို႔ေနရပ္ဇာတိျဖစ္တဲ့ တာႀကီးတန္းမွာေတာ့ အေခ်ာဆံုးအလွဆံုးလို႔ဆိုၾကပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ သူတုိ႔အိမ္ေထာင္ေရးဟာ စိတ္သေဘာထားခ်င္း မတုိက္ဆိုင္တာေတြေၾကာင့္ မတည္ျမဲခဲ့ျပန္ဘူး။

Fortunately, Min Kyi got a chance to study from a great artist, a disciple of great Myanmar artist U Ba Nyan. His name was W Kyeesein. Min Kyi was able to learn closely from him as his teacher took on various subjects in his paintings – from Jataka tales to landscapes to portraits. (Most artworks of W Kyeesein could be found in the town of Hinthada.)

မင္းၾကည္အေနနဲ႔ ပန္းခ်ီပညာကို ထဲထဲ၀င္၀င္သင္ယူခြင့္ရခဲ့တာဟာ ဆရာႀကီးဦးဘဉာဏ္ရဲ႕တပည့္တစ္ဦးထံမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဆရာႀကီးဦးဘဉာဏ္ရဲ႕တပည့္တစ္ဦးဆိုတာက ဆရာႀကီး W ႀကီးစိန္ပါ။ မင္းၾကည္ဟာ ဆရာႀကီး W ႀကီးစိန္ ထံမွာ အနီးကပ္ေလ့လာႏုိင္ခဲ့တဲ့အျပင္၊ ဆရာႀကီးနဲ႔အတူ ပန္းခ်ီကားအေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားကို အတူေရးခြင့္ရခဲ့တယ္လို႔ဆိုတယ္။ ဆရာႀကီးဟာ ဗုဒၶ၀င္ဇာတ္နိပါတ္ေတြ၊ ေအာက္ဒိုးပန္းခ်ီေတြနဲ႔ ပံုတူပန္းခ်ီေတြကို အမ်ားအျပားေရးဆြဲခဲ့သူျဖစ္လို႔ မင္းၾကည္ အတြက္ ကံေကာင္းခဲ့တယ္လို႔ဆိုရမယ္။(ဆရာႀကီး W ႀကီးစိန္ရဲ႕လက္ရာအမ်ားစုကိုေတာ့ ဟသၤာတၿမိဳ႕မွာ တစ္စုတေ၀း တည္း ျမင္ႏုိင္ပါတယ္။)

The paintings of W Kyeesein carried an intriguing mixture of composition and color separation. In addition, his brush style might have been a profound influence on Min Kyi’s paintings.

ဆရာႀကီး W ႀကီးစိန္ရဲ႕ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြမွာ လူပံုအထားအသို၊ အေရာင္အလင္းအေမွာင္ ေရာေႏွာေရးဆြဲထားတာ ေတြဟာ စိတ္၀င္စားစရာေကာင္းတာကို ေတြ႔ရတယ္။ ဆရာႀကီးရဲ႕စုတ္ေရးဟန္နဲ႔အေရာင္ေတြဟာ မင္းၾကည္ရဲ႕လက္ရာ ေတြအေပၚ အတုိင္းအတာတစ္ခုအထိ လႊမ္းမိုးမႈ႐ွိႏုိင္တယ္လို႔ယူဆရတယ္။

With strong commitment, Min Kyi spent a lot of time on painting after the split-up with his first wife. Not only did she not understand Min Kyi’s passion for art but also did not know how to appreciate his paintings. She looked down on him. However, Min Kyi continued to paint with a smile.

မင္းၾကည္ဟာ ပထမဇနီးနဲ႔လမ္းခြဲၿပီးေနာက္ပုိင္းမွာ ပန္းခ်ီေရးျခင္းတစ္ခုတည္းကိုပဲအာ႐ံုစိုက္ၿပီး၊ တစုိက္မတ္မတ္ ႀကိဳးစားလာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ပထမဇနီးသည္ဟာ ပန္းခ်ီအႏုပညာအေပၚထားတဲ့ သူ႔စိတ္ကို နားမလည္ခဲ့တဲ့အျပင္၊ သူ႔ပန္းခ်ီကား ေတြကိုလည္း တန္ဖိုးထားရမွန္းမသိခဲ့ဘူး။ ဒါေၾကာင့္လည္း ဇနီးရဲ႕အထင္ေသးတာကို ခံခဲ့ရတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ မင္းၾကည္က ေတာ့ အျပံဳးမပ်က္ဘဲ၊ ပန္းခ်ီကိုပဲ ဆက္ၿပီးေရးလာခဲ့တယ္။

Min Kyi arrived in Yangon around the year of 1970 and pursued an artist’s career. He participated in many art shows with other artists and did a lot of outdoor-painting.

၁၉၇၀ ခုႏွစ္၀န္းက်င္မွာေတာ့ မင္းၾကည္ ရန္ကုန္ကိုေရာက္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ပန္းခ်ီအလုပ္ကိုပဲ မျပတ္တမ္းဆက္ လုပ္ခဲ့တယ္။ တျခားပန္းခ်ီဆရာေတြနဲ႔အတူ ပန္းခ်ီျပပြဲမ်ားစြာမွာ ပါ၀င္ျပသခဲ့တဲ့အျပင္၊ ေအာက္ဒိုးပန္းခ်ီကားေတြကိုလည္း အမ်ားႀကီး ေရးျဖစ္ခဲ့တယ္။

Then in 1972, he married for the second time - her name was Hla Yi and together with her, she brought six children from her previous marriage. Min Kyi did not have any children with her.

မင္းၾကည္ဟာ ၁၉၇၂ မွာ ဒုတိယအႀကိမ္ အိမ္ေထာင္ျပဳခဲ့တယ္။ ဒုတိယဇနီးသည္ရဲ႕နာမည္က လွရီပါ။ လွရီနဲ႔ အတူ သူ႔အရင္အိမ္ေထာင္ရဲ႕ကေလးေျခာက္ေယာက္လည္း ပါလာတယ္။ မင္းၾကည္ကေတာ့ လွရီနဲ႔ သားသမီးထပ္မရခဲ့ပါ ဘူး။

Hla Yi made a living as a peddler at pagoda festivals throughout the country. That was how she met Min Kyi in his hometown Hinthada. Sometimes Min Kyi went with her to help in her small shop.

လွရီက ေစ်းသည္အျဖစ္အသက္ေမြးသူပါ။ ၁၂ လ ရာသီ ဘုရားပြဲေတြတစ္လွ်ာက္လံုးမွာ တစ္ေနရာၿပီးတစ္ေနရာ ေစ်းလုိက္ေရာင္းတယ္။ အဲဒီအခ်က္ေၾကာင့္ပဲ သူနဲ႔ မင္းၾကည္ဟာ ဟသၤာတမွာ ေတြ႔ခဲ့ၾကတာပါ။ တစ္ခါတစ္ေလမွာ မင္းၾကည္ကုိယ္တုိင္ ေစ်းလုိက္ေရာင္းေပးခဲ့ရတယ္။

Min Kyi prepared canvases and frames by himself until he was satisfied with it, and would do a painting wherever he went. “A painting a day” – that was his motto. He actually stuck to it by doing a number of paintings.

မင္းၾကည္ဟာ ပန္းခ်ီကားတစ္ခ်ပ္ကိုေရးေတာ့မယ္ဆိုရင္ ပိတ္စနဲ႔ေဘာင္ကို သူကုိယ္တုိင္ စိတ္ႀကိဳက္လုပ္တတ္ သူပါ။ ဘယ္ေနရာေရာက္ေရာက္ ပန္းခ်ီကားတစ္ခ်ပ္ကို ၿပီးေအာင္ေရးတတ္တယ္။ ေန႔စဥ္ေန႔တုိင္း ေရးတာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ “တစ္ေန႔ တစ္ကား ၀တၱရား” ဆိုတာ သူ ေျပာေလ့႐ွိတဲ့စကားပါပဲ။ အဲဒီစကားအတုိင္း ပန္းခ်ီကားေျမာက္ျမားစြာကို သူ ဖန္တီးခဲ့ပါတယ္။

Min Kyi had so many distinctive personality traits and one of them was when he painted, he would lose himself in his thoughts, talking with no one and just listening to music. He listened to traditional music especially songs by Khin Nyut Yi and Mar Mar Aye, both famous in the country.

မင္းၾကည္ဟာ ထူးျခားတဲ့စ႐ုိက္လကၡဏာ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား႐ွိသူတစ္ေယာက္ျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ အထူးသျဖင့္ သူ ပန္းခ်ီဆြဲ ေနစဥ္မွာ ဘယ္သူနဲ႔မွစကားမေျပာေတာ့ဘဲ၊ သီခ်င္းေတြကို နားေထာင္ရင္း သူ႔ဘာသာ အေတြးေတြထဲမွာ နစ္ျမဳပ္ေနတတ္ တယ္။ ျမန္မာသံစဥ္အဆိုေတာ္ေတြျဖစ္တဲ့ ခင္ညႊန္ရီနဲ႔ မာမာေအးရဲ႕သီခ်င္းေတြကို သူက နားေထာင္ေလ့႐ွိတယ္။

When someone criticized his paintings, mostly he would not respond except saying just a few words sometimes. Though others had treated him with contempt or spoke badly about his paintings, he never did the same to them. He just committed himself to his work, saying it was a true happiness having no strict rules over thoughts, vision and colors.

တစ္ေယာက္ေယာက္က သူ႔ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြကို ေ၀ဖန္လာတဲ့အခ်ိန္မ်ိဳးမွာလည္း သူက စကားနည္းနည္းေလာက္ နဲ႔ပဲ တံု႔ျပန္တယ္။ လူေတြက သူ႔ကို အထင္ေသးၾကတာေတြ၊ ဘာေတြေရးထားမွန္း မသိဘူးလို႔ ေျပာၾကတာမ်ိဳးေတြ ႐ွိခဲ့ေပမယ့္၊ သူကေတာ့ အားလံုးအေပၚ တေလးတစားပဲ႐ွိခဲ့တယ္။ ဒါ့အျပင္ သူ႔ကုိယ္သူ ပန္းခ်ီဆြဲတဲ့အလုပ္မွာပဲ ျမွဳပ္ႏွံထားခဲ့တယ္။ ပန္းခ်ီကားတစ္ခ်ပ္ကို လြတ္လပ္တဲ့အေတြးအျမင္၊ အေရာင္ေတြနဲ႔ ဖန္တီးရတာဟာ ေပ်ာ္စရာေကာင္း တယ္လို႔ သူက ေျပာေလ့႐ွိပါတယ္။

His friends called him “Black Kyi” as a joke when they all got together to paint. Responding to that banter, Min Kyi would just say: “You all don’t get it”. His friends called him that because even when he used a new canvas and paints, his painting would look like an old one upon completion.

သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြ စုၿပီး ပန္းခ်ီဆြဲၾကတဲ့အခါတုိင္း၊ သူ႔ကို “မည္းၾကည္” ဆိုတဲ့နာမည္ေျပာင္တစ္ခုနဲ႔ ေနာက္ေလ့႐ွိၾက တယ္။ အဲဒီလိုအေခၚခံရတဲ့အခ်ိန္တုိင္း မင္းၾကည္က တစ္ခြန္းတည္းျပန္ေျပာတယ္။ “မင္းတို႔ နားမလည္ပါဘူးကြာ” သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြ သူ႔ကို အဲဒီလိုေခၚရတဲ့အေၾကာင္းရင္းက မင္းၾကည္ဟာ ပန္းခ်ီကားတစ္ခ်ပ္ကို ပိတ္အသစ္ ေဆးအသစ္နဲ႔ ဆြဲသည္ျဖစ္ေစ၊ ၿပီးသြားတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာ ပန္းခ်ီကားေဟာင္းတစ္ခ်ပ္လို ျဖစ္ေနတတ္လို႔ပါပဲ။

Regarding to art, Min Kyi had always believed in his own views and philosophy, never giving up upon those even when things were tough.

ပန္းခ်ီအႏုပညာနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ရင္ေတာ့ မင္းၾကည္ဟာ သူ႔ကုိယ္ပုိင္အျမင္နဲ႔ အေတြးအေခၚကို အျမဲယံုၾကည္ခဲ့တဲ့အ ျပင္၊ ဘ၀မွာ အခက္ခဲဆံုးအခ်ိန္ေတြ ၾကံဳရခ်ိန္မ်ိဳးမွာေတာင္ သူ႔ခံယူခ်က္ကို စြန္႔လႊတ္ခဲ့သူမဟုတ္ပါဘူး။

Min Kyi had no intention of selling his paintings. He just wanted to put them in front of him and watched them pleasingly. So selling his paintings for his family resulted in many hurting memories. He told his family: “Now I have to take out my heart (meaning his paintings) for you all”. Nevertheless, he had never showed any feeling about it and kept on creating even harder. One could imagine how he must have felt and struggled in that terrible life.

မင္းၾကည္ဟာ တကယ္ေတာ့ သူ႔ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြကို ေရာင္းဖို႔ရည္႐ြယ္ခ်က္မ႐ွိခဲ့ဘူး။ ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြကို သူ႔ေ႐ွ႕ မွာပဲ ခ်ၿပီး၊ တစိမ့္စိမ့္ ထုိင္ၾကည့္ေနခ်င္သူမ်ိဳးပါ။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ သူ႔ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြကို မိသားစုစား၀တ္ေနေရးအတြက္ ေရာင္းခ်ရ ခ်ိန္မွာ နာက်င္စရာအမွတ္တရေတြ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ရတယ္။ “နင္တို႔အတြက္ ငါ့အသည္းႏွလံုးေတြကို ဆြဲႏုတ္ပစ္ရေတာ့မယ္” လို႔ သူ႔မိသားစုကို ေျပာေလ့႐ွိတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ သူက ဇနီးသည္နဲ႔သားသမီးေတြအေပၚ ၿငိဳျငင္တာမ်ိဳး မ႐ွိခဲ့တဲ့အျပင္၊ ပန္းခ်ီကား ေတြကိုပဲ ပိုၿပီးႀကိဳးစားပမ္းစား ေရးဆြဲခဲ့တယ္။ ဆိုး၀ါးလြန္းတဲ့ သူ႔ဘ၀အတြက္ ဘယ္ေလာက္ခံစားခဲ့ရမယ္၊ ဘယ္လို ႐ုန္းကန္ခဲ့ရမယ္ဆိုတာ ေတြးၾကည့္ႏုိင္ပါတယ္။

Rarely could Min Kyi use high quality painting materials such as canvas, brushes, paints and other tools. He could only afford low-priced materials. Moreover, he preferred to work on a painting using old brushes, as he loved the flexibility of an old brush moving at his will.

မင္းၾကည္ဟာ ပန္းခ်ီဆြဲတဲ့အခါ ပိတ္စ၊ စုတ္တံ၊ ေဆးနဲ႔ တျခားပစၥည္းေတြကို အရည္အေသြးေကာင္းေကာင္းနဲ႔ သံုးႏုိင္တာမ်ိဳး ႐ွားပါတယ္။ သိပ္ၿပီးေစ်းမႀကီးတာမ်ိဳးေတြကိုပဲ သူ တတ္ႏုိင္ခဲ့တယ္။ သူက စုတ္တံအေဟာင္းေတြနဲ႔ဆြဲရတာ ကိုလည္း ပိုသေဘာက်တယ္။ သူ႔စိတ္ သြားရာေနာက္ကို စုတ္တံက လိုသလိုလုိက္ေပးႏုိင္တဲ့သေဘာကို ႏွစ္ၿခိဳက္တာပါ။

There was another curious thing about Min Kyi. We found a lot of painting in 5x7-frame size on which he had produced to the last detail like big-size paintings. Maybe these were done when he was so much into outdoor painting and it could be presumed that he reworked on them for a standard size later.

သူနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ထူးျခားတာတစ္ခုလည္း ႐ွိတယ္။ ၅/၇ လက္မအ႐ြယ္ ပန္းခ်ီကားေလးေတြမွာ ပန္းခ်ီကားႀကီး ေတြအတုိင္း အေသးစိတ္ဆြဲထားတာေတြကို အမ်ားႀကီးေတြ႔ခဲ့ရလို႔ပါပဲ။ ေအာက္ဒိုးထြက္ရင္း ဆြဲခဲ့တာေတြျဖစ္ႏုိင္သလို၊ အဲဒီကေနမွ ပန္းခ်ီကားႀကီးေတြအျဖစ္ ေျပာင္းလဲလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ ယူဆရတယ္။

Min Kyi, for quite often, referred to himself as a new generation artist of U Ba Nyan.

မင္းၾကည္ဟာ သူ႔ကိုယ္သူ ဆရာႀကီးဦးဘဉာဏ္ရဲ႕မ်ိဳးဆက္သစ္ပန္းခ်ီဆရာတစ္ေယာက္အျဖစ္ပဲ ရည္ညႊန္းေလ့႐ွိ ပါတယ္။

In 2004, he found out that he had cancer. Nonetheless, Min Kyi put a great effort into creating more paintings as he needed money for his medical bills. As a result, his health deteriorated rapidly.

၂၀၀၄ ခုႏွစ္မွာေတာ့ သူ႔မွာ ကင္ဆာျဖစ္ေနေၾကာင္း သိလာခဲ့ရတယ္။ ေရာဂါဆိုးႀကီးကို ၾကံဳလုိက္ရေပမယ့္၊ သူ႔အ တြက္ ေဆးကုစရိတ္အတြက္ ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြကိုပဲ ပိုၿပီးအားစုိက္ေရးခဲ့ရတယ္။ အဲဒီလိုေတြေၾကာင့္ က်န္းမာေရးအေျခအေန ကလည္း ႐ုတ္ျခည္းဆိုသလို က်ဆင္းသြားတယ္။

“Others create a painting to come out from the inside of it. Min Kyi creates it to go into the inside of it.” He said these last words while looking at his paintings and saying joyfully to his artist friends.

“သူမ်ားေတြက ပန္းခ်ီကားကို အထဲကေန အျပင္ထြက္လာေအာင္ဆြဲတာ၊ မင္းၾကည္က အျပင္ကေန အထဲကို၀င္ သြားေအာင္ ဆြဲတာ” သူ႔ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြကို ေငးၾကည့္ရင္း၊ ေရးေဖာ္ေရးဖက္မိတ္ေဆြေတြကို ျပံဳးျပံဳး႐ႊင္႐ႊင္နဲ႔ ေနာက္ဆံုးေျပာ သြားခဲ့တဲ့စကားျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

It was said that Min Kyi was asked to eat vipers when his cancer became worse – maybe that is because many people in Myanmar believe it is a cure for cancer in accordance with traditional medicine. However, he could not take it much longer and wrote a note that said, “I’d rather choose death if I were to live at the cost of the lives of others.” At that time, he could not speak at all, as result of cutting out in his throat to cancer.

မင္းၾကည္ဟာ ကင္ဆာေရာဂါပိုၿပီးဆိုး႐ြားလာခ်ိန္မွာ အမ်ားက ၀ုိင္းေျပာၾကတဲ့အတြက္ ေျမြေပြးသား စားခဲ့တယ္ လို႔ဆိုတယ္။ ေျမြေပြးသားစားရင္ ကင္ဆာေပ်ာက္တယ္ဆိုတဲ့ ႐ိုးရာအယူအဆတစ္ခုေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္ႏုိင္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ မင္းၾကည္က ၾကာၾကာဆက္မစားႏုိင္ခဲ့ဘူး။ “သူမ်ားအသက္ေသမွ ငါ့အသက္႐ွင္ရမယ္ဆိုရင္ ငါ မစားေတာ့ဘူး။ အေသခံ လုိက္မယ္” ဆိုၿပီး စာတိုေလး ေရးျပတယ္။ အဲဒီအခ်ိန္မွာ ကင္ဆာေၾကာင့္ လည္ေခ်ာင္းမွာ အေပါက္ေဖာက္ထားရတဲ့အ တြက္ စကားမေျပာႏုိင္ေတာ့ပါဘူး။

In 27 July 2008, Min Kyi left this world, and his art, his beloved family and his dear friends. If there was one thing that he could bring with him from this world, undoubtedly, it is his name – artist Min Kyi.

ဒီလိုနဲ႔ ၂၀၀၈ ဇူလုိင္လ ၂၇ ရက္ေန႔၊ ေန႔လယ္ ၃ နာရီခြဲအခ်ိန္မွာ ေရာဂါေ၀ဒနာကိုခံစားရင္း သူ ကြယ္လြန္သြားခဲ့ တယ္။ သူ ခ်စ္ခင္ျမတ္ႏုိးတဲ့ ပန္းခ်ီ၊ သူ႔မိသားစု၊ မိတ္ေဆြသူငယ္ခ်င္းအေပါင္းကို ခ်န္ရစ္ၿပီး ထြက္ခြာသြားခဲ့ရၿပီ။ ဒီေလာကႀကီးကေန သူနဲ႔အတူ ယူသြားႏုိင္တာတစ္ခု႐ွိခဲ့တယ္ဆိုရင္၊ အဲဒီတစ္ခုဟာ “ပန္းခ်ီမင္းၾကည္” ဆိုတဲ့ နာမည္တစ္ခု ျဖစ္မယ္ဆိုတာ အေသအခ်ာပါပဲ။