Entry to The Artists Place, the studio where I’m currently working in Bangkok
Cynthia Morris at Original Impulse recently interviewed me about how I manage to live this crazy creative life that I do. We talk about paper, people, places, and more. ”Take a tea break,” she says, “and join the conversation below”.
You can listen to the audio interview here.
Image Used With Permission From Beauty And The Bath Geisha Hair Gallery
This geisha’s photo could have been printed on postcards or sold to a private client. She was taken by a professional studio photographer. Cyanotypes were an affordable way for photographers to test the density of their negatives, and were rarely preserved. But this beautiful picture was kept and chemically toned to a more neutral sapphire blue.
The final image would have been a more traditional black-and-white or sepia-toned print, probably hand-tinted with color.
Thanks to Beauty and the Bath for the use of this image.
I’ve just backed up my laptop and rediscovered forgotten images.
Some Thai boxing photos from a week in Hua Hin, 2005:
Low light photos with no flash turn a brutal scene into a beautiful one.
Colors and highlights are painted onto a dark background.
The effect is rich like pastel on sandpaper.
Movements sketched onto the lens by slow exposures.
I looked at the fight through my lens, one round at a time.
The camera didn’t leave my eyes till the boxers had finished fighting.
There were boys who’d taken steroids then stopped, and men at their prime who still took them.
Any accomplishment demands intense physical and mental power.
Psych out your opponent and you’re halfway to victory.
Each win means there are more who wait to fight you.
And one day you’ll stop winning. What then?
If you’ve ever wondered how I make the blue cyanotype prints that saturate my website, have a look at the pictures below.
Whether you’re printing on silk, wood, plaster or paper, all you need are:
1. Chemicals and water,
2. a Surface for printing
3. a Design, and
4. Sunlight
1. First, mix these powdered chemicals with 100cc of water each:
* Ammonium iron(III) citrate (‘green’ variety) 25g
* Potassium ferricyanide K3[Fe(CN)6] 10g
The chemical names might sound toxic but they’re not – unless you eat them with your lunch.
Supplies are available from Photo Formulary, or just Google “Cyanotype” to find one near you.
2. Paint the silk – or paper, or wood, or whatever you’ve got – with a brush or roller. Avoid brushes with metal surfaces; they’ll react with the iron-based chemicals.
Dry in a dark room.
3. Set up your image in a semi-dark room. Your design could be leaves like this, or a digital negative printed on acetate for photos, or any objects that block light in an interesting way. Take a look at my portfolio for examples.
4. Expose your image outside in direct sunlight. Developing time will vary depending on climate, strength of chemicals, and the objects you use, anywhere from 10-80 minutes. You know the print is finished when it’s darkened to Prussian blue then lightened again.
Final step: Rinse the print for up to 10 minutes. Add some vinegar/citric acid to the rinse water.
Your final impression is the unique combination of light, water, and chemistry of a particular day. Every printing session has unexpected variables depending on your water acidity, the pollution or cloud cover, and where in the world you are.
And most of all, it depends on your creativity.
Rice terraces in the hills near Lao Cai, Vietnam, near the Chinese border
NOT! But wouldn’t it be delicious if these tiers really were a giant caramel cake?
We were headed to a Red Dao hilltribe village in northern Vietnam, looking for handmade paper made of rice straw. It had rained that morning and the asphalt was heating up just before midday. I tapped my guide on the shoulder to stop our motorbike. Took this photo from the back seat. Framed and bracketed it with a handful of shots, then we were off to the mountains.
Rice crackers dry in the sun along the river, Luang Prabang
I’ve just begun the first draft of the Lao portion of my book on handmade paper, and am having continual flashbacks to my too-short time there earlier this year.
Laos distinguish their cuisine from neighboring Thai and Vietnam by their emphasis on sticky rice. When in Northeast Thailand and in Laos, don’t pass up the chance to enjoy sticky rice with your meal.
Like a savory rice krispie cake, this is a delicious and nutritious way to get your sticky rice quotient for the day. Once dry in the sun, these crackers are deep fried. You dip them in an assortment of delicious sauces with a fishy flavor at a riverside restaurant, then sit back and wait for your next BeerLao. It might well take awhile to arrive, but laid back Laos gives the illusion you’ve all the time in the world.
Senior class Photos
“There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s me,” is the unimaginative white lie tacked onto the end of too many relationships. Last time I said it was at a wine bar in Edinburgh during their Festival ten years ago, to some poor guy who’d flown out to meet me there. In a recent interview with Accidental Expats I explained why I left the US permanently: “the priorities of my birth country are not necessarily my own. Instead I seek to savor a few of the many experiences that the world offers in different locations.”
Priorities include retailer-driven holidays: Valentine’s Day, Christmas and Hallowe’en. As Kelsey Timmerman wrote, “Black Friday: The day the American Consumer takes full advantage of Cheap Labor around the World.” Where the focus is on sentiment and stuffing faces. Where stuff serves as a distraction from substance.
Thanksgiving’s a particularly ambivalent holiday for me. I went to school with kids from many different backgrounds. Some of my great-great-great grandparents fled European wars to live in the US, while my Hmong friends’ families had fled persecution that stemmed from the American war in Laos. Other friends’ ancestors had been brought over with fewer options: as slaves and indentured servants. Opportunism was in our genes and in our American mythology. But for some classmates, Thanksgiving was a reminder of what they had lost with the pestilence and the underhanded treaties that had squeezed their families onto reservations. Every year we had discussions about the less savory sides of our country’s history, which were rarely addressed in our textbooks.
Perhaps it’s because what American culture I do experience is online and more mainstream now, but I don’t hear much from those voices anymore. As I’ve said before, America’s not the only country with this problem: every time I walk to the train station I pass a mural depicting massacres of local people. I’ve spoken with Cuban painters about the island’s indigenous people who were completely exterminated by the Spanish. But while I’m thankful for so much in my life, as this writer puts it best, “Thanksgiving can never be just a day of thanks”
Sketching in a Cemetery, Paris 1998
Recently I headed to my favorite local cafe for a dinner break with a slim book, The Quiet American by Graham Greene. I looked forward to some good background music and a healthy fresh meal on dishes I wouldn’t have to wash afterwards. I’d been writing much of the day and preparing sketches for a new painting. Preoccupied with afterimages from the sketching session, I didn’t notice the notebook on my table after I placed my order.
A man around my age suddenly sat down across from me. I looked up from my book, startled, and he belatedly asked, “Mind if I sit here?” Actually, I did mind. He was good-looking: tall and slender with tousled curly hair, nice clothes that hadn’t seen an iron in awhile, but even if I had been single, I would’ve had no time for him.
“I’m working,” I said, though hadn’t thought of it that way before. I was reading The Quiet American for the fifth time for pleasure but also for the book I’m writing: to sift through Greene’s prose looking for his impressions of a Vietnam that disappeared decades before my first visit there. This guy was apparently a friend of a friend, but I had no interest in distraction by strangers, whatever their intentions. The man stood up, apologized, and left with his notebook.
In the past I’ve always focused on either writing or visual work; rarely have I done both at once intensely, simultaneously as I am now. Until I wrote a friend I didn’t realize how packed my schedule is these days:
8am-9am: Writing online
9am-Noon: Misc. admin or head straight into painting/visual work
Noon-1pm: Lunch and misc. emails
1pm-5/6: Visual work – painting, photography, printing
6-9pm: Yoga class, dinner, online writing, etc
9pm-Midnight/2am: Offline writing, sometimes Twitter
But this schedule is my choice: in order to complete the book and Calendar Girls in time for a US tour next fall, this is what I’ve got to do. For the next several months. The daily accomplishments keep me going: meeting my word counts, adding highlights and midtones to a painting.
And, really, who wouldn’t rather have dinner with Graham Greene than with a stranger?
From the Tin Hau Festival in our village on Lamma Island, Hong Kong. It’s held at the beginning of each summer, and celebrates the birthday of the Goddess of the Sea. Pinwheels’ spinning in the wind will bring good luck and smooth sailing for the coming year.
Plaque on the Long Bien bridge, Hanoi Vietnam
We never know how the choices we make will shape the future. I wouldn’t have ever imagined my dislike of French language classes would eventually lead me to work in Morocco, Vietnam and Cambodia with projects that required fluency in the language.
I completed a Fine Arts program within a well-regarded public American university; we were expected to have a thorough education along with our arts focus. This included competency in a foreign language to graduate. Most fellow students complained, or just buckled down and sweated through it – which didn’t appeal to me because I’d barely passed French classes in high school. Wealthy students enrolled in expensive study-abroad programs. This wasn’t an option: I paid for my own schooling and couldn’t afford the expensive tuition. Instead I created my own program [and worked 40-60 hours a week at retail and hotel jobs to build up my savings].
In 1998 I studied the language at a university in France, and sent drawings and paintings home to my painting instructors. This enabled me to complete painting coursework while living there and on the road in Belgium, London, and Eastern Europe during school holidays. I was able to see firsthand many of the artworks by northern European artists that had inspired me in the past. While the language courses were helpful, I really learned French by spending time in clubs and bars and flirting in cafes with friends who were native French speakers.
After graduation I was a full-time artist with both studio and apartment rents to pay: lots of freedom but not a lot of cash staying in my pocket. So when designer friends told me they were looking for a translator for the antique markets at Avignon and Paris, I jumped at the chance. We spent two weeks on trains, in vans and junk shops and collectors’ gardens, rooting out good deals and negotiating terms and prices. Many of the dealers spoke some English, but were much more relaxed dealing with a French-speaking americaine than with deux americains.
Several years later I was offered a trip in Morocco as a translator with the large tour company Grand Circle Travel, and accompanied a local guide from Marrakesh to Fez to the Sahara. The highlight of our trip was a dinner of a dozen elderly americans with a local family in Fez. We ate tagine and flatbread with our right hands. Afterwards we sipped sweet mint tea and I translated both sides of an intensive Q&A about aspects of American/Moroccan culture, from US gangs to majoun, a delectable [so I hear] cannabis nougat.
Eventually, my curiosity about manifestations of French culture – among many other interests – led me to Cambodia, where after starting my own program, I eventually worked with the Angkor Photo Festival, teaching photography to street children. It is a French-run festival, and while my experience with teaching photography was the reason I was approached, my facility in the language helped make everything happen.
Most recently I was drawn to Vietnam and photographed this Frenchman’s folly-turned-success, for another French-run project: the Long Bien bridge festival. One of my prints of the bridge sold this week at auction for US$350, well above my estimate of $200-300 [based on my current print prices].
You never know where this road will take you. But first: you’ve got to get started on it.
I'm an american artist with an Asian focus.
I paint sharp-witted women.
I print blue photos of disappearing places. Sometimes I work in Sydney, some times I work in Asia. You can keep up and connect with me on Twitter, and Facebook, and Flickr
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