When the Legends Fail

I was recently chatting with an old friend from art school. We’ve kept in touch over the years seeing each other’s art shift and form, succeed and fail. We’ve encouraged each other to stay in the race and not give up. I showed him a picture of something I was working on recently. It was just a light hearted cute little illustration of some auburn fall leaves tumbling down turning into little crimson hearts. 

“These are deeply satisfying,” he says. “Like Winslow Homer met Bill Watterson. Except more free.” 

I don’t believe that my little illustration merited such a tremendous compliment. But I took it anyway. Both of these artists are legends to me. It took me back to my childhood. I didn’t grow up close to the sea. Though I may have loved it as much as Winslow Homer did. I grew up in the landscape of Bill Watterson. The American Midwest. Fall, winter, spring, and summer. Calvin’s summers were much like mine, growing up in a place where the city was far away and the woods were in abundance. I read those comics during the long summer months when school was out and there was nothing to do. The mornings were late, the days were long, and the nights were filled with fireflies flickering over open fields. 

Idyllic. 

An artist, a cartoonist, a philosopher, a storyteller, a legend… and a six-year-old kid forever. Watterson has gone to a place where few have gone: a place of unprecedented success where his personal integrity and the purity of his art were maintained. With an uncompromising attitude, he turned away more fame and fortune than many of us will ever know to uphold the intrinsic value of his art and not cheapen it with endless merchandizing. 

I went to purchase the latest book about him, Exploring Calvin and Hobbes. It contains the crown jewel of interviews: a 35-page interview with Bill Watterson. Liquid gold in the form of words. The reclusive cartoonist opens up about his life and work after so many years of silence. And I do respect his silence.

He’s open, poignant, wise, and naturally very very funny. He also talks about one thing that we can all relate to: Failure (with a capital F). He was fired from his first job out of college and this is what he said about it:

True, although there were a number of years out in the wilderness. My failure was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me, although I don’t recommend the humiliation and insolvency so much. But if my experience at the Post hadn’t been so catastrophic, I don’t think I would have started over. I’d have limped along doing weak editorial cartoons, and would have never gotten to what I was good at. I didn’t want to throw away all that time and effort, but sometimes you can’t move forward without going back to the beginning to get your bearings again.

And in the long run, nothing is wasted. It takes a while to see this, but it’s true. I learned a lot about drawing and about how to work with complex ideas for those years. It was valuable. The failure also raised the stakes for me on a personal level. Years later, when I finally got syndicated—when they finally opened the gate—I ran like my head was on fire. The Post failure made me realize that this wasn’t going to come as easily as I’d thought. So I treated the marathon as if it were a flat-out sprint.

I love what he has to say about his failure. I love it so much. 

Nothing is wasted. 

I’ve experienced a decent share of failure in life. I'm still waiting for the return on many of those "investments." Oceans of missed opportunity, poor choices, and other inadequacies. There were palliatives for mistakes. And yet, nothing is wasted. That seems like too much grace for me. But I think it’s true. I believe in grace. There is a need for grace in our world. 

Don’t be afraid of failure. Don’t be afraid of that wilderness, even if it may last for a few years longer than expected. There is grace and the courage to change. Failure may cause charting a new course and new unexpected opportunities may lie in wait. Maybe the legend of success is different than what success is in real life. Staying true to oneself may be the cause for a longer and more winding road. 

Let’s stay in the marathon and overcome. It may take longer than expected, but it will be worth it. Let’s turn mishaps into adventures, problems into opportunities, and failure in to success. 

The Only Painting that Went With Him

I gave this painting to my uncle when he was battling lung cancer. I was in America and he was in Taiwan. I went to visit him when he was diagnosed. It was fall in Taiwan. He was still healthy and seemed carefree. He took me to eat panda shaped donuts. He took me to the markets in the city to find pomelos, my favorite fruit. He took me to classes that he taught at his university. Bright students all around. He still smiled and still sang his favorite tunes from youth … when time was infinite and life was limitless.  

“…Bye Bye Miss American Pie…” 

One day somewhere in between the rhythm and the blues, he said to me one of the most meaningful compliments I’ve ever received. He spoke to me in Chinese, “Even though you may not look like much on the outside (to the Chinese there is always something wrong with the way you look), there is something special that glows and shines from your face. It’s like a light. When I see you I think you’re beautiful. I believe it comes from deep inside you. I know that you are a good and kind person and that makes me like you even more.” I was taken aback. Maybe it was so meaningful because it came from him. My uncle. My JiùJiu. 

Some of my fondest childhood memories were in Taiwan with him, my brother, cousins, and all, running along the small serpentine sidewalks that lace around the green rice paddy fields. We went to play basketball. My aunt made homemade dumplings for us when we returned. Basketball, rice paddies, and dumplings on those hot humid summer days. 

When I returned stateside, I mailed him this painting. I prayed that somehow I could weave the very fingers of God into the yellow lights of the trees or the crimson stains of the cascading flowers. Maybe those red flowers could absorb and contain the life that was bleeding out of him and give it back when his body was healthy and his lungs alive. 

During that last visit, an image of him was preserved in my mind. It was the last time we saw each other. Healthy, happy, and free. As the year unfolded and the battle went on, his body continued to degenerate. Time poured in and funneled into the last few weeks of his life. It was a time when I couldn't tell what were morning shadows or evening half lights. My mom never would stitch together a description of how he really was doing. The only thing she would tell me to do was to remember him as he was when I last saw him. Healthy, happy, and free. It was fall in Taiwan then. Remember him then. Remember him strong. Much stronger than lung cancer. 

He died a year after that visit. He died in December.

His body was cremated. Besides the garments that covered him, the only thing that went in there with him was my painting. My aunt laid it on his chest. It was a gift during the last year of his life. My little watercolor. Blue hues, little trees, crimson flowers, and yellow lights. I cried when my mom told me. 

This painting never saw a gallery wall, or any wall. It was never sold, never purchased. Never framed, never matted. It existed just for a small moment in time, given as as gift, was burned, and turned into ashes. Only this blurry capture of it remains. I will never hear from my uncle what that painting meant to him. Whether or not he liked that particular shade of yellow, or the whitespace above, or the little mountains below. These strokes, those hues, or that blue. Maybe it made him smile a real smile. Maybe it made him laugh a real laugh. Maybe it made him feel loved with a true love. Maybe it told him of salvation, when spirit joins a body that will never die. Maybe it gave him beauty and breath during his last year, the hardest year. 

I never knew what I really meant to him until that day. I never knew how meaningful my paintings could be until that day. I know he cherished it. I know he cherished me. 

Patience is Everything

Sometimes we artists are in a fury of creating and making good art with words, paints, clay … and sometimes we tumble out of that storm and can't seem to make a thing. Life happens and responsibilities take precedence. Studio spaces with that coveted north light shining in turn into cramped closets with no sunlight at all. Large oil paintings on canvases turn into small sketches on old coffee stained napkins. Beautiful oaken shelves that once displayed our most precious and meaningful collections turn into cardboard boxes taped shut as the footholds of having a home become ever elusive. Time and seasons slowly pass by. And we wait. We wait constantly for the same wick to absorb the salubrious precipitations of creativity and ignite into flame. 

I had a conversation with a friend of mine, an emerging writer, about these highs and lows. She looked at me and said, "You, my friend, are an artist even if you're painting or not. " I stared back at her wanting to believe that it was that simple and true. She then referred a book to me, Letters to a Young Poet, authored by Mark Harman. It's a collection of 10 letters that were written between 1902 - 1908 when the nineteen year old aspiring poet, Franz Kappus, wrote to the then twenty-six year old poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, seeking advice about his poetry. I found that these were not only letters, but a great life manual that reaches to the soul. 

I wanted to share with you a quote from one of my favorite parts in this little book.

He writes,

It’s all about carrying to term and giving birth. To let every impression and every seed of a feeling realize itself on its own, in the dark, in the unconveyable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of your understanding, and to await with deep humility and patience the hour when a new clarity is born; this alone is to live artistically, in understanding as in creation.

Time is no measure there, a year is worthless, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means not to calculate and not to count; to mature like a tree that does not pressure its sap and stands amid the spring storms with assurance and without the slightest dear that summer might not come. It does come. But it comes only for the patient ones, who stand about as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and vast. I learn this every day, learn it amidst considerable pain, for which I am grateful. Patience is everything!

What I like about this quote is that he describes what it's like when something faint is ruminating inside waiting to take form. Sometimes it is time to fight for it. To fight with pens and papers or with paints and brushes to bring it out. Other times it’s a time to wait and trust that it will come to its full fruition, like the slow passing of winter into spring. Many times it doesn’t come in the timeframe we want it to come and it doesn't always take on the form that we think it should, but to some degree it’s true and sincere. Discerning when to fight and when to wait is always complicated and unclear - to me at least. Maybe it will be easier as the journey continues. 

In this letter, I am reminded of mostly of patience. Patience for the moments when you're making everything you have ever wanted to make and patience for the moments when you're not making everything you wish you could. 

Starry Starry Night Over the Dinner Table

I was at an old family friend’s house for dinner the other day. The table was filled with delicious platters of the food that I grew up eating – fried turnip cakes, dumplings, mapo tofu … all sitting on the reputable table of a most beloved Chinese auntie. During dinner, the father of this family (I call him ‘Su-Su,’ which means uncle in Chinese) was recalling an old song that he used to love. As he started to hum the tune, the lyrics started to churn in all of our minds. 

“… But I could have told you Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.” 

It’s one of my favorite songs. I used to listen to it all the time on long drives through the wooded countryside. It’s a song by Don Mclean, titled Vincent, and a tribute to the brilliant post impressionist painter, Vincent Van Gogh. I don’t know why these lyrics moved me so profoundly this time, but they did.

During his time, Van Gogh was thought of as an erratic and uneducated artist. People thought he painted the way that he did because he was crazy and incapable. Maybe he had a little too much absinthe too. But now, from his paintings and writings, we see him as an artistic genius. His paintings exude a rough beauty and an unutterable honesty. He felt compelled to go on seeing, drawing, and painting the way he did even when no one could see the value of it. Van Gogh saw things differently; he saw beauty and purpose in capturing the world the way he did.

In a letter to his brother Theo, he wrote: 

How good is it to walk along an empty beach and look at the gray-green sea with its long, white streaks of waves when you are feeling depressed. But if you have a need for something great, something infinite, something in which you can see God, you don’t have to look far: I think I have been something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than an ocean expressed in the eyes of an infant when it wakes up in the morning and crows with pleasure, or laughs because it can see the sun shine in its cradle. It there is a rayon d’en haut, a “ray from heaven,” perhaps it can be found there.

He had beautiful eyes, beautiful sight, and a beautiful mind. 

Sometimes I feel that I see it too. It’s when a certain kind of light shines for which I have no language to describe – the trees and the fields reflect a certain luminous color and it looks as if the lights from heaven are illuminating these grounds below. For that moment, I’m lost in it. I want to get closer to it, I want to peel all the layers off of it and then patch them back together. So I pull out my paints and I paint it and try to remember it as the light quickly changes. I rearticulate that moment over and over again, so that I can really see it. By the time I'm done the moment already is a memory mixed with imagination. 

We are all given a different pair of eyes. Many of the things we pay attention to and notice, no one else does. We want to rearticulate, interpret, and collect what we see to feel that connection and reciprocity. I wouldn’t call myself an artistic genius by any means, but I’ve been given a beautiful way of seeing. We all have, really. I want to treasure it and allow myself to see the way I was created to see. I want to honor the way others see, so that perhaps the people like Van Gogh can find a home on this earth. 

Starry starry night, paint your palette blue and grey

Look out on a summer's day with eyes that know the darkness in my soul

Shadows on the hills, sketch the trees and the daffodils

Catch the breeze and the winter chills, in colors on the snowy linen land

Now I understand what you tried to say to me

How you suffered for you sanity, How you tried to set them free

They would not listen they did not know how, perhaps they'll listen now

Starry starry night, flaming flowers that brightly blaze

Swirling clouds in violet haze reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue

Colors changing hue, morning fields of amber grain

Weathered faces lined in pain are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand

Chorus:

For they could not love you, but still your love was true

And when no hope was left in sight, on that starry starry night

You took your life as lovers often do,

But I could have told you, Vincent,

This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you

Starry, starry night, portraits hung in empty halls

Frameless heads on nameless walls with eyes that watch the world and can't forget.

Like the stranger that you've met, the ragged man in ragged clothes

The silver thorn of bloody rose, lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow

Now I think I know what you tried to say to me

How you suffered for you sanity How you tried to set them free

They would not listen they're not listening still

Perhaps they never will. 

Vincent by Don Mclean

Seeds of Imagination

I recently read through a biography on J.R.R. Tolkien, authored by Humphrey Carpenter. Tolkien's valorous and imaginative tales have always been a source of inspiration for me ever since I was young. I got lost in his stories. Countless times I have wished that I were a hobbit from The Shire. In my mind's eye, I still meander to those other worlds from a different time formed by the boundless landscapes of a childlike imagination.

I am on the path that the art paves for me and am set to learn how to wade through its capricious ebbs and flow, even if it progresses ever so slowly and is full of tribulations and self-doubts. Here is how Tolkien describes the process of creating:

"One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter."

The creative process is about being aware to your tendencies. What do you pay attention to? What's already inside of you? What always captures your attention?

My personal compost heap perhaps is made up of empty paint tubes and the overgrown, but ever present, memories of perfect sunsets over a true horizon line. Perhaps the real matter of what's in my mould will be revealed with a little more time and water. Even though I can't see them all, I know there are some really good seeds of imagination there to cultivate and watch grow.

A New Day

It's a beautiful new day for a beautiful new website! Welcome! Thank you for visiting! I hope that you enjoy looking through everything :)

Here is a little peak of some of the cards that I have been working on. The cards below are called, "Cadmium Curtains." This is a salute to one of my favorite colors in the whole world: Cadmium Red. Light, medium, or deep ... I love, I love you all. Whenever I squeeze that glistening crimson color out of the tubes, for a very faint second or two I can almost hear a choir of angels singing, "Haaaaa-le-lu-jaaah!!" 

These little paintings are about playfulness and beauty. They recollect the timeless memories of skipping stones on a still and silent lake.