Microft Framing and Photographic

Kapo Don Chew 1947-2012

This information came from one of Kapo's friends.

"Kapo came from a very wealthy family from Singapore. His parents used to have acres and acres of rubber plantation in Malaysia, Johore state, a town call Kota Tinggi, not very far from the island of Singapore. He is of Chinese and Hawaiian origin.

Kapo came to UK aged 18 and graduated at Cardiff University with a Mechanical Engineering Degree. He was a man of many talents....He loved cooking and cooks very well. He used to own a restaurant in Manchester for some years. Kapo was also in the book selling business and promoted Joy Adamson ( Born Free film). Kapo formed a team promoting books all round UK and Scotland.

He also help to set up a dry cleaning company with 20 branches in UK. His last job was in a textile clothing company called Claudia Plc, Park Royal, London, as a Buyer Director. The company supplied cothing to C&A and the Burton group.

Kapo was very good with colours, accuracy and attention to detail in all his undertakings. He was a very talented painter and was taught by Patrio Anigoni who painted the queen's potraits. So in this past 10 years he paints a lot and loves outdoors activities; camping, fishing, bird watching, mushroom picking. He use to go to the New Forest national park near Southampton at the the weekend after a long hectic week at work.

He always said to me ...' Never fear, when kapo is here...' He wrote a few poems for me and he drew a potrait of me too."

~~**~~

I only met Kapo on a couple of occasions but had several good conversations about photography and engineering. I was delighted when he left a book of 27 watercolours for me to use in the shop and always wanted to present these in a special way rather than standard framing. It was quite by chance that I discovered printable slate and even happier that one item matches very closely the form factor (height vs length) of Kapo's images.