I had a small epiphany today. I'm lucky enough to live on the edge of a small community close to Munich. I got in the habit of going running a few times a week, and one day stumbled on a lake, though at the time it was still a construction site, presumably a gravel quarry. Turns out that once the project was finished, the area was turned into a park and has since become a year-round fixture for me and my family. I run around the lake a few times a week, my wife and I walk and talk around it routinely, my daughter talks us into jumping in the water when it's warm enough. It was a lifeline when Covid came around. It's surrounded by farmland and shady paths. It's a refuge for all kinds of birds, and the weeds and wildflowers just go crazy. And then the frost comes, and they go to sleep. This year especially, the imagery of this place really started to affect me. I find myself daydreaming about shapes and lines that I gathered there. In a fluid and natural way, this utterly ordinary, yet magical place has become a part of me, and by extension my art.
Feeling truly at home somewhere has been elusive for me. So much so that the opposite, feeling a bit ambivalent about where I live, has become my normal state of mind. I grew up in four different countries (Germany, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Malaysia). Even the 20 years I spent in the United States were marked by regular moves, either within and around Oklahoma City, or an all too brief (but amazing) stint in upstate New York. The five years and four months I’ve now spent in Germany is as long as I’ve spent in any neighborhood as an adult, and it doesn’t look like I’m leaving anytime soon (though you never know). I’m grateful to feel a bit more rooted, and I’m excited to dig deeper into my surroundings as part of my creativity.
How do places influence art? The impressionists, for example, directly interacted with their environment with their paintings. The places are to some degree inseparable from the art. It’s clear that if Monet or Van Gogh had lived and worked in Brazil or New Zealand, and not in France, the images that we can all conjure up without too much effort would look very different. People sometimes ask if growing up in Southeast Asia influenced my art. Years ago, I did paint a small series directly engaging with the suffering of Cambodians under Pol Pot, which is something that has haunted me for most of my life. But other than that, the influence is harder to pin down.
I think it’s something more ethereal that moves through the fiber of the images. There’s a sense of melancholy that touches most of what I create. Growing up feeling like an outsider, but also absorbing some of the trauma unique to those places definitely plays a role. But there’s also a sense of peace and gratitude that those places helped me find, and that is just as important. I’m clearly still working through it, which makes it all the more inspiring to realize how the environment I move through now is affecting me in a more direct way.
Inspiration is a nebulous concept. At its most basic, it’s simply a thing that makes me want to create something in response. That doesn’t mean that the response resembles what inspired it, but the inspiration is nevertheless a part of it. My current place has of course had this kind of impact, but recently this has evolved into a more direct interaction. Photography comes into play as a way to capture what I notice, and also provides material that I can manipulate and combine with whatever my subconscious pours onto the picture plane. I’m learning to appreciate and draw life from the place I live in, and in turn discovering ways to welcome it into my creative flow. It’s good to be alive.
