“There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present. And knows the present. Is capable of reliving the past, but basically it has only the present… The remembering self is the one who keeps score, who maintains the story of our life…. The remembering self is a storyteller…That is the basic response of our memories. We don’t only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us Stories. What we get to keep from our experiences, is a Story.”
-Daniel Kahneman, The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory.
“You are the universe experiencing itself.”
-Alan Watts
I went to Siem Reap for 5 days in 2005. Took lots of photos, as one does when on vacation. This was before the iPhone came out, so I remember that many of my fellow tourists were wandering around the temples capturing moments with big DSLR cameras. For the record, I had two small cameras, a Canon PowerShot A70 and a Yashica T4 35m, with me. But the moments I remember most vividly are not the ones I took photos of.
I hurried through this sketch at Ta Prohm quickly, the sun was setting and the mosquitos were buzzing around my bare arms. The last of the tour groups was leaving. A woman lingered to watch me draw the roots before darting off to her bus. I remember thinking that it was ironic I was rushing through this drawing although the tree and the building clearly weren’t going anywhere. I wondered if, if I returned to finish the drawing in several years, any stones or branches or roots would be out of place.
It’s funny that the main thing I remember about drawing at the tourist sites was not the sites themselves, but the people around me. It’s hard to sketch in a public place without it kind of becoming an unintentional performance piece. I had to work through this uncomfortable feeling that people were expecting my drawings to be really amazing (if she’s taking the time to sit here and draw, then she must be an artist with a capital A, no?), which was a bit of pressure and revealing of my own insecurities as an artist. But once I got past that and got absorbed in the drawing, then it was a relief. At Bayon, as I struggled to capture Jayavarman’s enigmatic expression, I spoke with two Indian girls from Thailand, and a group of Cantonese guys from Malaysia. They wanted to know why I wasn’t taking photographs instead. I didn’t want to get into a long drawn out philosophical discussion, but I said something along the lines of “I think this captures my memory of this experience better.”
Most of the time I tried to draw when the tourist crowds were thin. The Khmer kids who hung around the entrances and exits selling trinkets and guidebooks would sometimes sit next to me, play with my colored pencils and watch me sketch. I didn’t need any more woven bracelets, but I asked one of the souvenir sellers if I could do her portrait. After I finished, two of her friends came by and asked me to draw them too and so I did. At Angkor Wat, a group of local boys spent 10 minutes behind me looking from the drawing up to the view repeatedly, commenting to one another in Khmer. I was nervous that they were critiquing my technique, but I never learned what they thought; our conversation was limited to where I was from, and how many days I was staying in Siem Reap. Later on, as I was packing up to go, an old woman came by. She kept looking at me expectantly, so I picked up the pencil and added a palm tree on the right. She smiled, nodded and moved on.
Usually, it isn’t so easy to find time to draw while on vacation. With just three or four days to try to experience an entire city or region, I usually fall back on snapping photos and buying souvenirs to enjoy later. Seems so ironic to travel to another place to get away from something, to experience something else, and then spend so much of the time trying to record it to remember it later, right? Anyway, I have always been interested in how we record things and remember things, and for me the act of creating — whether you are drawing, writing, printing, sculpting or editing — is less about accurately documenting objective reality and more about articulating, preserving, telling and shaping memory…
I remember I only had a few remaining shots on my disposable underwater film camera at Palau Jellyfish Lake. It seemed like the mystical feeling of floating among soft, blobby dancing aliens couldn’t be captured in a photograph anyway. There were so many jellyfish — up, down and all around — it felt like I was inside a 3-dimensional pattern. I went home and sketched jellyfish again and again from different angles. Months later, I made some screen prints of the jellyfish pattern. Metallic ink on a dark background seemed to convey their otherworldly effervescence best.
The souvenirs I got in Laos included: some handmade mulberry paper, a 2-square-foot piece of silk and some dyed thread from a one-day weaving workshop, some local candy and a jar of the local Lao chili condiment, jaew bong (which was so good it lasted only one week in our refrigerator after we brought it home). Oh, how I wish that that flavor could be captured in photographs!
I wanted to make something from the paper and thread, and eventually came up with these little journals. I didn’t really intend to sell them when I made them so I kept them on my bookshelf trying to think of what would be appropriate to write in them. After a while, I sold them to someone on Etsy, in the hopes that they could live another life holding someone else’s memories.
