Chiang Mai Silver

A sample of photos from recent days.
This week we made silver wedding rings for one another at ArtLab in Chiang Mai



R polishing my ring under instruction by Mr. Jaturanon at ArtLab



And I'm looking more like a red-dyed Russian than ever, using a blowtorch as I make Roy's ring.

Now we're getting ready to sign some papers on the lovely, lonely off-season beaches of Koh Lanta in southern Thailand.

Would you trust THIS man with your Website?

This is TJ at his finest on my mom's front lawn. He's a fire-eater, Renaissance Fest performer, and multimedia man extraordinaire, and has offered to work on my site over the next few months. Hurrah! It's about time I got something besides this blog (essentially a diary with pictures) online.

I haven't gone far with website plans before, as I wanted something beyond the glorified, loosely organized "HERE I AM with some of MY ART" site one sees so often with amateur artists. And hell, I'm an amateur, too, but it's time to get organized.

Funnily enough, as I've begun to coordinate plans, images, and ideas for photo series, the phrase "selling out" has come up in a few conversations. It's a tough balance between ivory towers and street-level commerce, though never a compromise. "Selling out" is uttered most often by mid- to late-adolescents who haven't got the vocabulary to phrase things in a more subtle or pensive way. Typically, they also have little experience in earning a living, as well.

Thing is, when it comes to those visible things we call "art", all is variable, depending on the medium you're using. And most of all, how you produce (or reproduce) it.
My experiences have been mainly with different forms of painting, some with photography and printmaking, and, to a small degree, with sculpture.

~ My oil paintings, whether personal or commissioned, are labor-intensive, with many thin layers and often weeks of drying time.
~ Wax (encaustic) paintings generally require less time to paint than oil, though they are less easily worked over, as texture and colors tend to build up quickly. Also, making encaustic paints takes loads of time and material resources.

~ Sculpture tends to be either fragile or cumbersome, of expensive materials or requiring expensive equipment to produce. It can be unique, or multiple images produced from the same mold. All the above will greatly affect the selling price.
~ Printmaking typically requires use of a professional studio, plates can be expensive, and one foul step - depending on the method of printmaking - can ruin an entire image. Still, this can be offset by the multiple prints that can be produced from one plate/stone/woodcut/etc. Since prints are produced in multiples, they are a more affordable and democratic art form, with less cachet than paintings' unique images.

All the media described above are, in general, unquestionably labelled as "art". Photography, on the other hand, is more controversial, and still struggles for legitimacy in the gallery-driven "art world". [The fringe/contemporary museum/grant system is another world entirely, and is not one in which I will work anytime soon or likely in the future. My tastes tend more towards the classic, and I don't look for an entree to the avant garde; most of the art in that arena is uninteresting to me aside from in an abstract sense.]
There are a dozen subsets of photography, and I worked with many kinds of photographers when I lived in Brooklyn. It is a challenge for many to label photography as "art". When looking at a photo, one isn't struck as with the romantic image of a painter with palette & beret, or sculptor with model, or printmaker carving away at a block of wood.

Alternative photography, however, is something else, and falls between the cracks of assumptions people have of other media. I bring a painter's approach to blue prints, so enjoy that every image can be very different; variations happen in the way I paint on the sensitizer, so an image could be framed a hundred different ways. Exposure time will greatly affect the feel of a photo, as will any unnevenness in the chemicals' pH and distribution. All these elements keep me intrigued with the process, and I have no desire to control them past the foundation of what is needed for an attractive print.

Still, I'd planned to have some blue prints on my website by now, but there haven't been any that were worth exhibiting yet. While beginning C4C in July, I was working on a series of silk blue prints at the same time in Cambodia. They all turned out poorly, in one way or another. All were too dark, or low-contrast, or stained with brown from Siem Reap's iron-heavy water. Negatives were constantly frustrating. Though I'd rinsed the silk well before printing, perhaps I need to do something else to the surface.

All trial&error, with few real successes. Still, all the "failed" blue prints were sewn into my blue silk wedding dress & shawl, and later failures will make purses & clothing for friends - and me, too.

Currently the Boy and I are in Chiang Mai, he completed his week-long massage course, we made our rings yesterday at ArtLab studio, tried to do marriage paperwork last week, but the British consulate here was closed due to flooding. So we'll do it all in Bangkok next week, and hopefully have a few days at the beach afterwards.

the Siem Reap River

brown as it is with silt and mysterious floating objects, can be a great spot for relaxing in the morning or evening.

There's always some point where I look up and a child is staring back at me. Sometimes it's a naked boy dripping from a swim in the river, hand extended, saying "One dolla, Coca, please, one..." I don't respond with sympathy to boys asking me for money anymore, however cute they can be.

Not since the time several weeks ago when as I got on the back of Yourath's bike I felt three pairs of hands all over my breasts, as I struggled to keep them out of my purse. True, the boys had probably had some glue beforehand to help them through the evening, but it didn't make me feel much kinder towards them.

When a friend visited recently and was tortured by the sight of kids begging in the street, I thought of one boy from another province (as nearly all the kids are; they're not local) who'd lost his leg in a landmine accident. He'd been at Akira's for a few days, where he'd have access to a government school and free english lessons from native speakers. Most of all, he'd have the companionship of other kids who'd experienced a similar accident. The boy's mother had taken him from Akira's because she knew she could make money from him begging on Bar Street.

This morning I paused by the river en route to the Old Market. Three girls walked up to me, eight to twelve years old. "Postcard, you buy postcard?" they asked, but soon gave up when I smiled and shook my head no. I thought of Villagegirl who used to sell T-shirts & drinks to tourists at Ta Prohm temple.

"I saw you before!" one girl said, "When you bought your bike with your friend." She'd been eating with her family in the food stall where Robert & I had debated exactly how much we were being ripped off for our bikes over cold soda.

"Can you read me this letter?" her friend asked, and handed me a piece of paper. It was an email printout, the right third cut off the page, from an American woman named Laurie. I tried to reconstruct the letter as best I could. She wrote of her parents in Florida and her grandmother, school and work. Asked what a "bay friend" was. "Boyfriend?" I wondered silently, thinking these girls seemed happier in one another's company than hanging out with boys.

"Here," Laurie's friend said as she screwed a ballpoint pen together, turned over the paper and handed it to me. "Write this to her," and she took a deep breath and looked at the trees clinging to the muddy riverbank. I grinned. It was obvious I wasn't going anywhere soon.

"'Dear Laurie,

"'Thank you for your email. Internet costs $1 for one hour. I am happy you saw your grandmother. My best friend is named Sarah.'" Aha! I thought, as Laurie's friend pointed at the other girl. I handed them Vitamin C candy and continued writing what I was told. "'She is a Cambodian girl.' What else did she ask me?"
She turned over the email and I read Laurie's questions about family and school.
"'We have no school right now. We have two months holiday. My family stays at home all day to make bracelets to sell to tourists.'"

I know those bracelets: tiny strips of leaves woven together to make lightweight bands, rippled and smooth like snakeskin. I'd gotten some my first time at Angkor two years ago, at what seemed to be a ridiculously low rate of ten for a dollar.

"'Thank you very much for your email. I hope to hear from you soon. Your friend, Mao. My friend Sarah is here, too.'
"Okay," Mao said to me. "Thank you very much! Nice to meet you again!" she waved as I got on my bike. Wow, I thought. I've just been dismissed!

Education or Dependence?

As the C4C project begins, in fits&starts, I'm consumed with ideas of how best to have lasting impact on the kids.

If the kids are serious about photography, they'll have the chance to learn from and connect with successful photographers, both Khmer and western. They'll learn a marketable skill, meet people who've been able to make a living at selling photos, and will also have the chance to have exhibitions at home and abroad. If they're not obsessed with photography - as one must be in any competitive field like this one - they'll have a great time taking photos and seeing the world in a new way. As will everyone who sees their photos, particularly tourists here in Siem Reap.

C4C is a small, grassroots project, for individual kids and their futures, and funded for the most part by individuals as well. A contrast to the some of the [I repeat - SOME!] large-scale NGOs with government contracts, grand ambitions, grants, and funding that you see everywhere here. I've begun to wonder how they affect Cambodia's present & future.

Recently, as I rummaged through vegetables at the Old Market, my phone rang from the depths, somewhere beneath baguettes and processed Vache qui Rit cheese. I dropped the aluminum bowl of vegetables on the scale and fumbled for my phone.

A shy male voice spoke quickly: "Hi, I am your friend's student at SITC. I hear you are looking to meet Khmer painters." What he was really after, it turned out, was a way to display his paintings online. "My teacher said you can help me," he said confidently.

"I can help you make a kind of website," I cautioned. "When can you meet?" Twenty minutes later he dashed up the stairs of Balcony Cafe. Straight away he pulled out a lined notebook filled with pen & ink drawings. Subjects ranged from sinuous portraits drawn with a metal nib to adolescent nightmares of rotting flesh detailed with a ballpoint pen.

He had finished formal schooling in 8th grade, "because my family was too poor for me to continue" - as most families are here. He'd gone to a prestigious NGO "Art School" during his teens then come to Siem Reap to try his luck at commercial work. He's been quite successful, and now wants to go to a Thai university to study animation.

Now he looked at me expectantly.
"These drawings are excellent," I said, "but the lined pages will be a distraction, so they can't be used for a portfolio. Do you have others I can see?"

The next afternoon he met me at an internet cafe, loaded with rolled drawings and CDs of his work. I told him about blogs and how they can be a simple way to display a portfolio. Emphasized it's not a traditional or professional website, but a simple, free way for him to get work to schools. He sat passively and watched, asking no questions as I set up his blog and a photobucket account for extra image hosting. [Asking lots of questions is a western habit.] At each step, I'd asked him to take notes, but they appeared as coherent as the first spelling test I took at a new school in second grade: completely out of sequence, therefore nonsensical.

"Now it's your turn," I said enthusiastically. "Try it!" He couldn't make sense of his notes - and neither could I - so I showed him again. Right, I thought. Art schools the world over are well-known for cranking out visually astute but functionally illiterate graduates. I doubted he'd had to do much note-taking for quite a while, if ever. So I gave him the play by play, instructing him to write: "Step 1 - write this.... Step 2 - write...."

As we went along and I questioned him further, I realized he had been expecting a full-fledged website with his own domain name and hosting. I, of course, was expected to design it. He wanted to dictate the design to me.
I shook my head. "If you go into your Yahoo mail account, you can design a free website there, or have someone else do it for you. But they have pop-ups. For the best look, you'll want to get a traditional website, once you can pay for the domain name and the hosting. I'm not a website designer, though."

I have been struck each time I come to Cambodia by the NGO economy here, which encourages dependence rather than education and practical skill application. Westerners are paid inflated salaries, even higher than necessary for the tertiary economy here [tourist pays most; expat pays less; Khmers pay the least].

At the painter's NGO school, his education was so limited in scope he now has to purchase a High School Certificate, to the tune of around $800US. American patrons will donate most of this. A worthy cause to be sure, but why doesn't the NGO, a very well-known school, have accreditation? This lack of consistency ensures its graduates have careers mainly as artisans, their futures limited to Cambodia, unless they pay what can only be called a large bribe.

Many NGOs are apparently training grounds for idealistic - or opportunistic - young westerners, who practice theoretical skills, newly acquired from university, in a third world country. Then they go back to their lives in the first world, with salty stories and an easier affectation of nonchalance. I've met French medical students who couldn't communicate with other doctors in Khmer or English, and students of all nationalities funded by their parents for a summer holiday of volunteering in Siem Reap. It's an ideal addition to students' resumes. Though they're "volunteers", their perks can cost an organization more than the salaries of Khmer colleagues.

And then the westerners leave. We all leave, unless we fall for an irresistible Khmer and decided to stick it out with them here indefinitely. What remains is the perception that the West knows best - with salaries to prove it - and Khmers remain grateful recipients.