Thai Mandala with Four Living Creatures, Watercolor and Pencil on Paper, 22X30. Private Collection. 2011

I have wanted to make a Thai style Mandala for some time now, and this commission gave me the chance to work on the idea.  My goals were to stay true to the symbolic visual language of  “Lai Thai” (Thai Design), but to make a Thai style pattern that was Christ centered. The challenge is how to make something Christ centered but not tacky or using an imported Western or culturally Christian symbol that jars the other motifs.

I practiced my Lai Thai for a few weeks to warm up to this piece. I am not sure the pencil shows up the design very well but pen seemed to flatten the drawing too much so I left it in the soft undulating pencil.  The Mandala uses improvised Thai patterns, but I used traditional images for the four living creatures of Revelation (and Ezekiel). In illumined manuscripts and in many European Christian traditions these have been used to symbolize the four gospels (man-Mtt, ox- Lk, eagle- John, lion-Mark). The center circle is filled with scripture from Colossians 1 in both Thai and English. The very center of the circle depicts a subtle cross, both drawing the eye to the center and expanding out to the whole. The work hopes to bear witness to the supremacy of Christ who as the Lord of the Universe comes as the fulfillment of the desire of all nations and cultures and reconciles all to himself. It is also my attempt to express a Christian Thai visual iconography.

Since doing commissions most of the last two years, this group of work was the first chance I’ve had to develop my own direction in quite sometime. I’m trying to rework some unfinished ideas, but as this shows, with much that I’d like to see happen yet. For one I am still looking for an economic, non-hazardous way of getting text onto a variety of supports. The process and support then dictate what kinds of media I can use. Mixed media is unwieldy because you can get a great variety of textures and integrate images and script, but you have to navigate what media goes together and in what order. You can never escape limitations. I think I will need to choose one primary method and stick to it if I want to really get the hang of any technique. I haven’t found my groove yet. It’s a work in progress.

Creation Mudra II. digital print, watercolor, acrylic and drawing media on paper, 2011.

Gratuity. digital print, watercolor and colored pencil on paper, 2011.

Sentient II. text book, glue, acrylic and oil on wood panel, 2011.

Untitled. colored pencil on paper, 2005.

Western Philosophy. digital print, acrylic, oil, charcoal and oil pastel on paper. 2011.

Let All Creation Dance. Oil and Photocopy transfer on canvas. 35X40 Private Collection

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”

Untitled, photocopy transfer and oil on canvas. 35"X40"

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

Here’s my latest. The title is weird but I haven’t been able to think of anything better. Any suggestions?

Back in the fall my friends Brandon and Rachel asked for something on baptism and communion. I toyed around with cliches: cups and pieces of bread floating around in a really “spiritual” abstract cloud, or a glowing still life, but started feeling like that hardly has anything to do with the actual experience of baptism and communion. A bit facetiously I imagined how funny it would be if instead of the glowing goblet, I painted the plastic shot glass, and instead of a luscious hunk of homemade bread, the minuscule powdery wafer. But I didn’t just want to focus on the elements. I didn’t want to forget that this is something people do together and in some ways to each other.

It’s not a bad thing for sacraments to be recognized as social phenomenon and experienced, not in the ideal, but in their idiosyncrasies. It’s not a bad thing for sacraments to be less-than-transporting or even downright awkward and mundane. In fact it’s good and honest and maybe less manipulative. Because no matter how we feel about our participation in these social enactments, if we are Christians, we know that something beyond our corporate or individual perception is factually occurring.  When we value these practices in their every-day actuality, I wonder if it makes it harder for us to compartmentalize them into the “spiritual” or “moral” realm. These experiences of water, food and drink are material just like our bodies and the rest of the world.

I used a biology textbook as the background type because I wanted to emphasize how we live in the factual physical world of our biological processes, of our cells and bodily functions and our mundane and complex social and behavioral environments. We wash, we drink, we eat. Then we do these things as Christians called the sacraments which are not some moral gloss on our real lives, but actually change the very cells of our bodies. That’s what we believe. We believe that in a mystical but completely factual and real way, when we are baptized we somehow are raised into a new kind of life (both biological and spiritual; bios and zoe), and when we take communion we actually ingest immortality and become part of a new social organism. In fact, we believe that some day we are going to get new physical bodies to live in a healed world. When we wash with this water, eat and drink, the cells of our bodies are different. Our behaviour is different…and we have a new kind of physical and social life together. This life is from God and to God but that doesn’t make it “out there” and unscientific. And it sure doesn’t make our day to day life ideal or grandiose. In fact it makes it more corporate and more engaged with the world around us because our materiality is grounded in it’s ultimate source and end. That’s what I think the sacraments are supposed to speak into being, that God became flesh and redeems our bodies to a new physical and social life. The the fact that it is from God is what makes it “spiritual,”  not its immateriality.

It’s no secret that USA”s politics are characterized by the two party system’s inevitable power play. Unfortunately the Church gets so mixed up in these issues with each side caricaturing the other out of legitimacy. Here’s a plea for a shared vision for another kind of kingdom that also deals with our very real needs and concerns, but is oriented to a totally different kind of power…and a different kind of community life.

This isn’t a great piece of art. I’m putting it up on my website not because I think it is awesome, but because I have to remind myself that doing art isn’t about doing great art. It’s about practice, perseverence, habit, and problem-solving. A lot of mistakes and lameness is the only way to get to something good.  I’d like to try this idea again and make it more ambiguous, sketchy with more breathing room. I didn’t have time to work everything out on this one because I had to have something ready for an event and you simply can’t undo acrylic paint. Maybe doing art will teach me patience.

These days, I’ve been thinking about both the certainty and uncertainty in the journey of faith. These are a bunch of prints I made in Jack McCaslin’s class a couple of years ago, inspired by Stephen Hawking’s Illustrated Brief History of Time,  a book on Islamic Patterns and Dave Pruet’s class on Quantum Physics and Native American spirituality.

Growing up as a M.K. in Thailand my childhood consisted of frequent travel and relocation; my paint box, colored pencils and sketchbooks proved to be reliable companions for the journey. Early on I recognized drawing to be a natural extension of my thoughts, feelings and prayers. Art-making is more than expression of experiences and ideas; it is a process of “working it out” — a method of seeking understanding and gaining knowledge. I was eighteen when I met Sombong and had never before needed so much to find a way of “working it out.”

As a child I had been aware of Thailand’s sex trade, but it was only when my family started visiting AIDS patients that the tragedy became a reality to me. Each visit was like having the air knocked out of my stomach as I learned the stories of the young girls from rural Thailand, Cambodia, Burma and Laos who are trafficked into Bangkok’s brothels and sold as prostitutes. They are kidnapped, deceived, or sold by their own families. Once they are working in brothels, they are strapped into a system in which they will continually be in debt to the owners. The government of Thailand does little or nothing about this industry, instead government officials, policemen and the majority of men in Thailand are open about their patronage of local brothels. Wives and mothers are passive and accepting of this reality. Most importantly, the Thai government turns a blind eye to the sex trade because the streets of Pat Pong in Bangkok are probably their biggest international tourist destination. Anyone who has traveled in Thailand will have noticed the disproportionate number of male tourists.

When she was 13 years old Sombong’s family sold her as a “house-helper” to a Chinese man in Bangkok, but it was no secret that Sombong was going to be used as a sex slave. Later on she worked as a prostitute, all the time sending her wages back home. When she became ill, she returned to the village in Det Udom, Thailand, but her family refused to care for her. Now stigmatized by AIDS, she was put in the back room of their home and neglected. Somehow her name was put on the HIV/AIDS support group roster at the hospital. Around the same time, a group of Thai believers made a commitment to start visiting AIDS patients on a weekly basis. They partnered with the support group at the hospital and soon befriended Sombong. In between hospital and hospice care, she also stayed with my family for some time.

Through contact with Thai believers, Sombong experienced the unconditional love of God. Here was a group of people that did not shun her, and instead reached out in friendship. The experience of church transformed her and she recognized herself as a child of God. I remember being awed and shocked to hear her say that she had forgiven her family. Though her body was weakening and she often expressed frustration, Sombong was energetic and motivated. While in the hospital, she wrote letters exposing the corruption of hospital officials who siphoned government aid money designated for HIV/AIDS patients. She also wrote thank you letters to her nurses and dreamed about opening a restaurant.

Hearing Sombong’s story and watching her struggle with dying so young, I started to draw. At first I was horrified with myself for wanting to draw this, but I knew there wasn’t a choice — it was going to come out one way or another. I was eighteen; I didn’t know what the word “catharsis” meant, and I wasn’t trying to do art therapy. I was simply responding to the fraction of her anger that I could understand, and dealing with my own feelings of outrage. The drawings here are mixed media: pen and ink, coffee stains and graphite, chalk pastel, monotype with printing inks and collage. I often used coffee washes, printing ink, or graphite rubbing to lay down a base layer that would both highlight and obscure the figure drawn into it. I wanted to achieve an evocative rather than articulate effect.

Sombong died in February 2002 alone in a crowded hospital hallway while I was still completing this project. Her family did not give her a funeral.

The same year Sombong died I returned to the USA and began university. In 2002 the situation of people with HIV/AIDS in the USA was quite different than in Asia. The crisis, hate crimes and rapid health decline of the 80’s seemed something of the past. But in Thailand in 2002, Antiretroviral treatments were not yet affordable or available in Asia because of the patenting laws of United States and European pharmaceutical companies. Without the new medication, a person with full-blown AIDS could not recover from infections. Four years later in 2006, I went back to Det Udom, my “home-town” in Thailand to volunteer with the HIV/AIDS support group at the local hospital. I found that due to the availability of new medicine (patents had finally expired) and better government funding, people who had advanced stages of AIDS recovered and could again lead normal lives. However, the stigma of HIV/AIDS continued to be a challenge. I found that when I sat down to eat lunch with a group of HIV+ friends, their family members and neighbors would exclaim at my actions and then ask, “Is it safe?” It was truly wonderful to see that after a few weeks they would come over and eat with us too.

Although the life expectancy of HIV/AIDS patients in Thailand has changed, widespread acceptance of the sex trade continues and people with HIV/AIDS all over the world still struggle with isolation and stigma. People in Africa – our brothers and sisters – are being decimated. While you look at these drawings, I invite you to think not only about the issues of HIV/AIDS and the global sex trade, but the invaluable worth of each human being, each as a child of God. What worth do we assign to other people consciously or unconsciously? At what cost are our actions played out? How can you, as a follower of Jesus Christ, walk with these brothers and sisters?

The originals are not for sale unless an organization would like to buy the whole show, but if you would like to use them to raise awareness for HIV/AIDS, have comments or questions, or want to buy a print of one of the originals here, please contact me. I would love to hear from you.

This may seem a strange group of work: geometric pattern, abstract design, mathematical equations, Asian looking motifs, references to gravity, Reimann and even the theory of relativity!

These pictures are some meditations on God’s creation of the world: God creating a cosmos – pattern, order, harmony, beauty and meaning, out of chaos – dysfunction, entropy, waste and mess. Geometry and physics are the ways we peer into the mind-blowing beauty of God’s creation, a creation that is full of meaning and potential. When we think of math, laws or logic we often think of them as stark boundaries or even limitations. What we find as we study patterns is that freedom to be is in within the limits. Just like in Romans, conformity to the image of Christ is the law that gives life and freedom. And as things conform to the perfect law, each thing finds its place and its uniqueness in harmonious relationship with everything else. This is what we see in the natural world. The equations found in physics spin out glittering galaxies. Geometric proofs are the basis for our proportional perception of beauty and relatedness. Logic is not abstract but helps us to understand meaning in the world of which we are a part. To me, pattern is ultimately a picture of reconciliation. These patterns remind me that because of who God is and how God made the world, there is unity in multiplicity. There is a way for us to be the body of Christ – all different yet all in harmony with one another. We are a pattern, a tapestry, more and more becoming reconciled to God and creation.

As we are becoming reconciled, we hope for that day when God will re-create our world, and everything – “absolutely everything” – in the Message’s paraphrase of Colossians 1 – “all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe – people and things, animals and atoms – get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies.” These are just a few pieces of artwork, but I hope they invite you to catch a glimpse of what C.S Lewis called The Great Dance. Hopefully they will spark your imagination of how everything in the universe was created for this joy.