An Old World Map, Coffee Art Painting

When I was at Chatuchak (JJ Market), I purchased this old world map which I thought was really quite something. Check out the details of this thing. I love what technology can do. It is not only "making the world flat", it helps make the distribution of this ancient map possible! Trying to get an original piece of this, if I can find one at all, will cost me the millions which I can never have in my lifetime. And there it was among the hundreds of ancient maps of all sizes and places in a little stall at the JJ market and for a few hundred bahts, I found this!

I thank coffee art painting, a contemporary style of painting. Before the actual coffee art painting process, it first involves the processes of scanning and printing the outlines of the map on ordinary paper, which is where the technology bit comes in. To give it that archaic brownish look, black coffee is painted over the paper before it gets hanged and dried. The final touches to the map would be painting the images with colours and that beautiful gold ink.

In just A4, so much is being contained; the little depictions of the elements Water, Fire, Earth and Air, the moon and sun eclipse, constellations in the northern and southern hemisphere, little notes about places that were unknown at that time. It's fascinating to read the olden names of places and the little notes were written in old English. It's quite an addition to my collection of artsy stuff. Me likes!



On the eastern part of the globe, we have Asia, Africa, Europe and Australasia. Antartica is in both eastern and western parts.


And here we are, covering a small land mass over the earth, South East Asia




Some bits of astronomical notes on the planets and stars. Suddenly, I feel like I'm in one of them fantasy movies as I try to comprehend the heavens (the movable one and the christian one) that is beyond the universe. Hmm.. is what they refer as movable a heaven of a different dimension? How exciting. I have many theories cooking up in my head already!


It says here it is a figure of the sphere. I am not sure if the frames around the sphere had anything to do with the line of rotation of the earth as it orbits around the sun.


Here we have the eclipse of the moon.


The element, Water


The element, Earth


The element, Fire


The element, Air


Constellations of the Northern Hemisphere


Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere