In early 2020 when teaching in Hangzhou, China, I traveled to Japan and got stranded for the entire year due to the pandemic. I was lucky to be given the perfect refuge, a renovated traditional house in the quiet village of Sonobe south of Kyoto. Here I lived and worked while teaching my Chinese students at Olive Tree International Academy remotely. While waiting for flights to resume and expired documents to be updated so I could return to China, I witnessed the entire cycle of growing and harvesting rice in the fields below the mountain . I began to document the place on daily walks, first with photography and later with black ink and watercolor. During this period, I also found myself drawn to Japanese food package design and made collages with fragments of food wrappers and text of Japanese writing - Kanji (the Chinese characters), and the syllabary alphabets of Hiragana and Katakana.
One of my favorite places in Bahrain was the museum coffee shop below the ancient fort where one can actually sit and enjoy the Arabian Sea, not easy to find in with all the land reclamation. The museum was full of artifacts, including pots that had been excavated from the fort. It was a beautiful modern, white structure that contrasted with the stones of the ancient fort. https://culture.gov.bh/en/authority/cultural_sites/QalatAl-BahrainSiteMuseum/
https://www.worldheritagesite.org/list/Qal%27at+al-Bahrain
China: series of photographs and watercolors done in Hangzhou, Olive Tree International School and at West Lake, a Unesco World Heritage "Cultural Landscape", Hangzhou
I will continue to add works I did in China, especially the paintings from an exhibition in Hangzhou that included paintings from West Lake as well as Japan. The best works from China are framed and hard to photograph. For now, this is glimpse of the many photographs I need to curate from my time of living and teaching in China (2017 - 2022, with the exception of 2020 when I was in Japan).
Double click to see the several photographs under each piece.
While studying with Quist Joseph at the School of Art, I installed works done in response to assignments, including objects and materials in reflecting on six years of living and teaching in Hangzhou, China.
While living and teaching in Myanmar (Burma) from 2011-2014, I did prints and collages in Yangon, paintings in Bagan, Inle Lake, and Napoli Beach. I also filled a sketchbook with studies of Ancient Burmese Hair Designs. As I find images of them, I will add the prints (direct trace monotypes) that were shown at an exhibition in 2014 before moving from Yangon for Tokyo.
