It’s always good to try out the local variations…
Below: A big Beijing brewery’s main beer and a version of Lays potato chips I’ve never seen… “Italian Red Meat Flavor”
These came from my first foray out into the neighborhood around our hotel. More pictures later. I promise they’ll be more culturally significant.
One of my little nerd-joys of this trip to China was the fact that we took a polar route, taking us past Magnetic North and relatively close to true North. Here are some screen shots of our flight path.
And any trip is better with Wes Anderson… I watched Moonrise Kingdom (as well as Argo andBeasts of the Southern Wild) on this flight.
Good times. More to come…
We are off! See you in Beijing!
Miranda singing “I’ll Fly Away” aboard our first leg of the trip to China!
It has been a while since I last posted. A lot has happened. Very soon we’ll actually be in the midst of a global journey that we’ve been imagining, thinking about, planning, and scheduling for over a year. In just hours we’ll slip out over the Midwestern landscape, drop in for a short stop in Michigan (yet another reason for me to love that state), and leap over the North Pole to China.
And then, just days from now, a daughter of China will also be a daughter of mine.
That’s the thought that has given me pause for weeks. That’s why I’ve had nothing to say. I’ve got nothing to add, nothing with which to editorialize this experience. It’s beyond me. It’s far beyond what I ever imagined for my life.
And yet, it’s very similar to the feeling I had in the days and hours before Miranda was born. You sense great change coming. You feel the air charging with energy. You feel the presence of massive forces converging. But you, yourself, are too limited to gain true perspective on it all. With deer-in-the-headlights-eyes you move forward, doing what you’ve made plans to do, pivoting as well as you can, and adapting in whatever ways you have to.
That’s where I am. I’m scheduling substitute teachers for my classes. I’m putting a hold on the mail. I’m in a freaking airplane cruising 30,000 feet over the arctic. I’m a pale foreigner from a young country standing in an ancient, hallowed land. I’m a fat, long-haired guy trying to help my little dark-eyed daughters understand love. I’m an experienced seer observing things – real things, true things, transcendent things – for the first time. I’m a man born in the year of the dragon standing on the Great Wall. I’m a husband in awe of his wife’s ability to actually make this stuff a reality. I’m a recipient of an Epic Grace that I can’t even begin to understand or appreciate properly.
Just days from now, a daughter of China will also be a daughter of mine. She’ll be a sister to Miranda, a child to Alison, and a grand-kid to Nancy and Kathy.
She’ll be one of us. She is already one of us. She has always been one of us.
I can’t wait to see you, Madeleine CaiQun.
We just got an update on Madeleine CaiQun – new pictures, details of diet, sleep patterns, and physical status, etc. I love that they are letting her hair grow (usually kids in orphanages have closely cropped hair).
And I love the little orange shoes she’s got on here. We’re coming for you, girl!
2012 was a good year for selling my work. Many pieces that we’ve lived with for many years are now gone. They live new lives with others. They will, in tandem with these fresh viewers, take on different resonances, build more meanings. Three recent sales in particular are significant to me. What’s interesting to me as an artist is that these works don’t necessarily represent the height of my prowess as a painter or draftsperson (Though I do count Four Pale Bricks as among the most significant paintings I’ve ever made). Nor are these works the end of a particular line of thought or closed, singular achievement. Each was, in some sense, a reaction to different pressures and concerns. They were attempts to understand influences, necessities, desires. They were stepping stones.
Untitled Landscape (#1), Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 46 inches, 2000. Private collection, MO. Click to view larger.
They are all about different times in my life. The colorful Untitled Landscape (#1) above was made when I was a junior at SAIC. It wasn’t meant to be my own personal expression. I was trying to understand Diebenkorn and integrate his approach to composition and structure. In spite of the derivative quality (something that’s unavoidable for any artist and something that, when embraced, can spark true development) the work displays my growing sense of color and use of mark and mass.
As I packed it up for delivery to its new owners, I was so pleased with the craftsmanship: the bars are still square; the canvas stretched and primed beautifully; the corners wrapped flat and tight. It was that follow-through with the love for the materials at all levels that, I think, made me develop as an artist. I wasn’t just winging it. I was being thoughtfully engaged all the way through. I’m not saying this just to toot my own horn… I’m just proud of the fact that, in spite of myself, I got something about materials, process, and focus that still rings true and gives the work quality.
Four Pale Bricks, Oil on canvas on panel, 14 by 22 inches, 2006. Private collection, MO. Click to view larger.
The second piece, above, really shows (to me) how my grasp of composition and visual dynamics was affected by combining my early love for Diebenkorn with my research, via Frank Stella’s Working Space, into the formal concerns of the Renaissance. Four Pale Bricks was painted very soon after my return from Italy, a trip that greatly supplemented what I thought I’d learned from Working Space. My encounters there with alchemical pictorial formulas, various numerological/metaphysical theories a la sacred geometry, and the intense formal constructions of everyone from Giotto to Pontormo were extremely influential. In many ways this work was the beginning of my current explorations into two-dimensional shape and angle dynamics as they manifest in illusions of space, air, and light.
Still Life With Tinfoil, Coal, and Plywood, Graphite on paper, 18 by 24 inches, 2007. Private collection, MO. Click to view larger.
This last work – something I shipped out to its new owner just this morning – is all about my having become a teacher. One of the things I believe in most strongly as an educator is that I must model the skills, ideas, and values that I teach. I will never make any impression at all if I merely vomit out vague data; I’ve got to believe it and practice it. This work came about as a challenge from my students, who did not believe the processes I was teaching them would yield positive results. As I drew this work, I took photos and from them produced a short video to demonstrate how it all worked. I have used this example every semester since. The piece is very sentimental to me because of how it embodies my own practice of teaching. I was willing to live out the things I talked about, and that made my students trust me.
Having these three works – and all of the others recently sold – go into the hands of people who appreciate them is wonderful for me. It’s also a reminder that gratification (and appreciation) is often very much delayed. I do work today that may only become appreciated decades from now. That is something that is hard for all artists – we are a notoriously insecure and touchy lot, aren’t we? – but having these works go out into the world is special.
It’s all the more special for me because every dollar from every sale I’ve made over the last year has gone directly into bringing Madeleine Cai Qun home. Now when I think of these artworks, I won’t only consider what they were for me or how they have gone to new homes, but I’ll be able to see in them how they gave my daughter a new home.
That’s a value that is transcendent. I’m thankful that my work as an artist can be a part of that even greater work of manifesting love and peace into the world.
There’s still a few more weeks before we head to China. If you’d like to help out in the final stretch by bringing one of my works into your home, check out my etsy site here.
There’s my daughter Miranda doing some complex equations on the chalkboard. She’s working out something profound there.
I’ve been trying to work things out, too. We’ve got a new daughter in China – Madeleine Cai Qun. We just found out yesterday. I’ve been thinking about it, trying to work out how it feels this time – this time being a dad. In some ways – between all the different sorts of work that I do, and trying to be a good dad, and trying to be a good husband – I often don’t know how I feel. My mind is usually full of research, various readings, lesson prep for 4+ classes, a whole range of concerns with my graduate students, community projects, church stuff, family stuff, house maintenance stuff, following up with friends stuff, the logistics of just being-where-I’m-supposed-to-be-when-I’m-supposed-to-be-there, and on and on… Often I don’t know what I feel or if I feel things at the proper proportion because I’m not being reflective enough – not being present enough, really – to have full awareness.
I know this is a season of my life and I know it’ll pass. But when I think about Madeleine and Miranda and Alison, I want to be totally clear.
When I see Cai Qun’s arm raised – little Madeleine Cai Qun Ballou – I’m perfectly clear. Let’s go get her now. I’m ready. I want to be her dad RIGHT NOW.
I guess that’s all I feel: let’s get this flight planned and the paperwork filed and roll. It’s transition time. It’s life-change time. I thank God for my awesome wife who has had the passion, dedication, intelligence, and intensity to follow through and pull this off. This is the sort of adventure we looked forward to a decade ago when we decided to get married. We never knew the specific character of the challenges or what particular form the dreams would take, but we worked it out. Sovereign movements indistinguishable from chance and incomprehensible without faith.
Just a few hours ago we received preliminary approval from China to bring this beautiful, divine, valuable girl home ~ Dang Cai Qun.
It’s a huge thing to be on the verge of having your life transformed as you transform the life of those around you. I’m thankful tonight. Such an adventure, this life. So many miracles and graces.
Dang Cai Qun ~ click her name to hear one of my former graduate students, Jackie (herself from China), pronounce the name for us.
If you want to help us with the final stretch of fundraising, check out the latest work I’ve posted to my etsy shop. If you want to hear more of the details as we move forward in the coming months to bring this little one home, see my wife’s site here. Be happy with us!
My wife, Alison, and I are beginning the process for an international adoption. It’s something we’ve thought about for a long time and something we’re excited about.
Above: me and my daughter drawing.
There are a lot of reasons we’re interested in this and there are a lot of logistics and options to consider. There’s tens of thousands of dollars to raise, most of which we don’t have just laying around. My wife is much more skilled than I am at holding all of these different issues in mind. She’s able to plan and strategize at a level that I can’t really even understand. So in the midst of this process I really just want to be able to DO something, to add something to it, to help make it happen.
As I think about this huge thing we’re getting into, I really just want to make sure that one of the other huge things in my life – my art-making – plays some role. I want to make my work mean more than perhaps it would on its own, more than it would do just hanging on a wall. I want my work to actually do something about the nearly 150 million orphans in the world. If, by some miracle, my artworks could help us bring one or two kids to a life of love and intentional care, then I want to do whatever I can to cause that to happen.
Above: Seven Mandalas for the Murky History of Beginnings and Endings, #5. One of the pieces for sale to help fund our adoption. My daughter Miranda helped me make this one.
So I’ve opened up a little etsy shop that features about 50 different artworks, with more to come. My hope is that I can have these works – images that I love and worked very hard to craft – become part of the means by which Alison and I do a different kind of work in the world… something that can make all the difference to a child who needs a mom and dad.
If you resonate with this sort of thing, I hope you’ll consider going to my etsy shop and purchasing a work. If you don’t see anything there you’re interested in, please check out my flickr and my main website as some of those works are still available as well; I’d be happy to hear from anyone who’s interested in any of the works.
eikonktizo 