The Beauty. The Tragedy. The Obsession.

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Replacing Those That We Lost

Posted by leerainboth on April 5, 2010 at 12:10 AM Comments comments (3)

January 12th, 2010, Haiti.  No one can know the numbers.  It's impossible to count.  it's useless to try.  Those of us who were there and survived what so many did not, we know how many we lost personally, but as a human race, we will never know how many of our brothers and sisters disappeared on that day in Haiti.


Obviously, to deal with this reality, I've turned to my art as my therapy to help clear my head and try to understand life.  It's been my Statistics series, once again, that I have been working on the most since that day.  However, the truth is that I've been working on these paintings primarily because they are what has been selling well, and as much as anything right now, I need to create things that are going to be able to raise funds to contribute to the recovery effort.  I really haven't spent much time pondering their new context or trying to redefine them at all in reference to this new tragedy that has so heavily redefined my life.  To me, I was just continuing a concept that existed before January 12th, but still held true, although maybe not directly related to the earthquake.  As I've been working on the small portraits, however, I've now been doing them in the company of other artists who have brought new eyes to what my work might mean.


I recently began working in a new studio in Mizak along with a couple of my past students and good friends.  It is a beautiful and peaceful place to paint, but it is also located in an active part of the community so we frequently have visitors pass by to see what these crazy artists are up to.  One day last week I had about ten of my Statistics paintings sitting out on a wooden bench next to where I was working when one man came in and greeted us.  When he came by and looked at my paintings sitting there he said, in a general manner to everybody in the place, "It looks like this is a workshop to create people."  Without even looking up from his own canvas, my friend Astrel responded, "Yeah, we're replacing those that we lost several weeks ago."


This statement gave me a whole new perspective on what these paintings mean to me, and could mean for others now.  I've called the series "Statistics," but there were more arbitrary statistics and indefinite estimates thrown around on the days following the earthquake than ever before.  Statistics that were meant to directly represent the same people and population that my paintings are meant to represent.  So many numbers were pulled out of thin air in those days and stuck to a vague concept of so many people that died in anonymity and then were buried in mass graves and burned in undignified piles.  These are exactly the people that a series of paintings like this was meant to give faces to, to show their individual beauty as human beings and make them something more than just bodies or victims.  So now, thinking of these paintings as a way to "replace those that we lost" makes the work even more personal. 


Even though the death tolls are still, and always will be, complete guesses in the dark, I know that I will never be able to replace them all with my little paintings, but whatever I can create will serve as a tribute and a memory.  So much destruction, creation is the only anecdote.

Life Defined

Posted by leerainboth on April 2, 2010 at 12:33 PM Comments comments (0)

This is the transcript of a gallery talk that I gave at a recent exhibition.


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I've titled this show “Life Defined,” because life is something that's never easy to define, but for myself, I use my art to define it.  Through my life experiences as I have traveled in Africa, lived in Mali, and currently am living and working in rural Haiti, I've encountered a lot of things that are very difficult to understand or explain initially, but as I take the emotions from those experiences and begin to put them into paint, they start to make more sense to me.  As humans we try to define it as best as we can through words and language and labels, but those always remain inadequate in truly describing the existence that we go through every day. So, for me, I always find that it's when I'm in the studio with that brush in my hand, interacting with the canvas, that I'm able to begin to discover what life means. When I'm walking around my community in Haiti, and I meet someone in the road and greet them, “Good morning, what's going on?” A very common response from the Haitians is “Well, I'm here, just searching for life.” My art represents my journey searching for that same thing, life and what it means.


 But how do you define it? Are you a glass half full or glass half empty kind of person? Myself, I've recently been accused of being naïve because I so often tend to focus on the good rather than the bad. But when it comes to my art, I always feel that it is necessary to express the truth, no matter what it is. Whether it's good or bad, uplifting or tragic, beautiful or ugly, whatever I find as reality, that is what I want to come through in my art. So as to not allow viewers to pass by in ignorance, but also not allow them to walk away completely depressed, I try to always create a balance between all those opposing forces that do define our lives on this earth. A balance between all of the beauty and all of the tragedy. Because yes there is war and famine and disease, but there is also soccer, and music, and splashing in the waves. I have actually been really looking forward to the unique opportunity that this show was offering me with two separate rooms to spread the exhibition between. I've hopefully been able to show both of those sides to my art this way but also show how they interact and relate to each other. In the other room, those are mostly my older pieces that are mostly inspired from my experiences in Africa and they tend to depict more of the suffering and despair. But in this room is more of my recent work that has been created in the last couple years since I have been living in Haiti, and through this work I have really seen my personal definition of life begin to transform. I don't choose to focus so much on the huge grand concepts of poverty and injustice but rather, my own life has found more significance in being defined through the individual faces of people that have had an impact on me and through the small subtle moments of pleasure.

 

It is those individuals that inspire me to make the art that I do. They have taught me a great deal through that daily searching for life in so many ways. Through their struggles and their triumphs and their simple moments of being who they are, beautiful creations worthy of attention.They have shown me so many things that I am compelled to communicate, some grand, others seemingly insignificant. But it is only in our interpretations that we can find significance, so I encourage you as you look at the art tonight, to not try to separate everything into black and white. As I have displayed my art in other places, I have found that people usually have one of two reactions to it. They either act like they feel obligated to be sad towards the despair of poverty or they just tend to gloss over all of the truth and say, “oh aren't those people lovely.” But really, the point of my art is that it doesn't have to be one or the other. So, this evening, as difficult as it may seem, I want you all to just remove the idea of poverty from your mind and react to the images for what they are, compositions of form and color. Respond to the people in those images for what they are, humans that may not be that different from you, and in every painting that you look at, search for some voice speaking to you personally through it.


So if someone asked me, “Glass half full or half empty?” I would probably answer, “It's half empty, but there's more milk in the fridge.” Yeah, things may be tough, but there's always hope. There's always potential for change, for growth. There's always the opportunity to create a different tomorrow. And, if we choose to invest in that which is beautiful, and see the beauty through the tragedy, then, ultimately, what is good and beautiful will prevail over what is tragic and ugly.


- - -


After the talk, I spoke individually with some of the people there as they continued to look at the work on display. There were two professors from the Simpson art department, a man and a woman, who were both standing, enamored, with one of my paintings entitled, "Destiny".  It's a piece that, as I've shown it extensively in other shows, it rarely attracts much attention, but these two seemed to be very intrigued and were discussing it with each other. As I approached them, the woman turned to me, gently shaking her head, and said, "I just love it." The man began pointing out the compositional elements that were so successful in it, particularly the way that the bars intersect directly over the eyes creating anonymity, and the way that the shadows gently fall back across the figures creating movement in contrast to the rigid stiffness of the grid created by the prison bars. Then the womanc ommented on the effectiveness of the color palette as there is really only one object in the image of color, the red cloth over the one boy's head, yet the purples and reds from the cloth are picked up in absolutely every other part of the painting from the white shirt, to the gray metal bars, to the brown flesh tones, to the dark black background. "It makes a feeling that is very warm and inviting in a situation that is obviously cold and harsh."

 

"I just wanna grab those bars and free them!" The man said. And that's when I new that I had accomplished my goal, not just with this painting, but with the show in general. Because rather than allowing a preconceived notion of the meaning of poverty to steer their interpretation of the art from the time they stepped into the gallery, they allowed the design elements within the work to generate anauthentic and sincere response. They went from seeing lines and colors to recognizing an overwhelming desire for liberation. It wasn't just a detached sympathy towards a misunderstood situation. It's the kind of response that most people aren't willing to give in to with my art but when they do, it means so much more. It makes the art more than those cliche photos of starving children on NGO's brochures and also something different than all the abstract compositions cluttering up the white walls of today's art world. And that's why I make my art.

 

Starving for Beauty

Posted by leerainboth on August 26, 2008 at 6:12 PM Comments comments (2)
At a reception for a recent show of mine, a woman came up to me and said, "I know that you paint images from Africa, but how come you never paint starvation?"  She knew that starvation was a big problem in Africa but didn't understand why she didn't see it portrayed in my work.  The truth is, I do have some work that is very obviously about starvation, I just didn't happen to have any up at this show.  But I tend, especially in my more recent work, to not depict those kinds of images very much.  Because everyone already knows that people starve in Africa.  In fact, it's the only thing many people know about Africa.  So it does no good for me to repeat it in my art.  What people don't understand are the more complex reasons that lay behind the starvation as well as the greater global consequences of neglecting such a need.  They don't understand that it's much more complicated than just a lack of food.  It's a weapon of mass destruction employed in conflicts that have deep political and ethnic roots.  It's a result of mismanagement of aid and ineptitude on the part of those offering the aid.  But ultimately, it's just one of the many symptoms of the greater ignorance of existence.  We may know that people in Africa starve, but we don't know who those people are.  So even if we feel sorry for them, such an abstract sympathy cannot accomplish anything. 

One of my favorite artistic inspirations is the incomparable photojournalist, James Nachtwey, who has, indeed, depicted starvation as much as anyone.  But his photographs are more than just a hungry child or an emaciated man.  He shows his subjects in the contexts that have created those situations and exposes the detrimental effects of such tragedies on society as a whole.  He refuses to let the viewers off the sympathetic hook too easily with a superficial, "Aww, that's too bad."  He fores them to look more seriously at the hidden implications and draws them deeper into reality.  And it is that kind of attitude towards his subject matter that I look to for inspiration.  Fearlessness and brutal honesty yet sensitivity and a broad understanding of the subject.

It also doesn't do any good to simply point out the problem, or to even try to fix the problem, no matter what it is.  There are actually a lot of people in the world that are willing to throw money at poverty, or food at hunger, or medicine at disease, but they never make the effort to understand the real causes.  Why not try to create environments where those things never become problems in the first place?  There is a Haitian proverb that says, "Don't wait until a person is drowning to teach them how to swim."  (And this is where I start to sound like the true neo-hippie that I am)  I believe that yes, beauty and tragedy both exist in abundance in places like Haiti, Mali, Uganda, and Sudan, but if we ever truly want the beauty to overcome the tragedy, then we must encourage those affected by the tragedy to search for the beauty in their own lives.  And, ulimately, if we promote what is good, and beautiful, and creative, rather than just trying to fix what is horrible, and ugly, and destructive, then those things that are good will prevail.  But if we simply continue to only try to fix the tragedies, then there's nothing to prevent them from happening again.  Which is why art is such an important component in international and humanitarian aid work and why, it does, have the power to save the world.  It all goes back to what Simaga Koulibaly told me while I was mud painting in Nara, Mali, on the edge of the Sahara desert, "Lee, as an artist, you have a power greater than that of any government official, judge, lawmaker, or religious leader to impact the lives of the people."  That why I depict what I do, whether it's starvation, or something completely different.  It all has the same goal in the bigger picture. 

Deserving Existence 2

Posted by leerainboth on July 24, 2008 at 6:28 PM Comments comments (0)
Haiti's been in the news a lot in the last few months.  Just since I left in March, all the big news programs have covered the food riots,  the forced resignation of the prime minister,  and the unfortunate trend of eating dirt cookies for survival, plus Nightline aired a special investigation program on "how to buy a child in 10 days" in Port-au-Prince.  And just a couple weeks ago, right before I made a short return trip, Haiti made the news again as one of the most popular musical groups in the country, Barikad Crew, lost 3 of its members in a tragic car accident.  Sure, I may be more prone to pay attention to all of this news, but it seems with so much happening, it would be nearly impossible for anyone to avoid at least hearing some small bit of factual information about Haiti.  Yet, I still frequently encounter people who have no idea what Haiti is or where it is or what is going on there. 

When I mention to people that I work in Haiti, they more often than not assume that it's somewhere in Africa.  They see the photos of black people living in impoverished conditions and, not knowing any better, they think that it must be in Africa.  When I first decided to go to Haiti last year, a lot of people who knew me, but didn't know Haiti figured that it was in Africa, simply, I think, because they knew that I had always traveled and worked in Africa before.  So, since they didn't know where Haiti was, and I was going there, it seemed reasonable that it must be in Africa.  But it has been incomprehensible to me lately as I notice Haiti popping up more and more in the news, that people would still be so clueless about this nation that is just a few hundred miles of the shore of the US.  If you mention any other Caribbean nation, Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, even the Dominican Republic, and Americans will know that they're just south of us.  They will probably even know someone who has spent their spring break there or taken a cruise there. 

Even just this weekend, as I was promoting HAPI's products at a trade show, a woman came up to the booth and was looking at some items, so I pointed out to her that "all these items were made by a group of Haitian artisans," and she looked at me completely confidently and said, "Oh, so they come from South Africa."  I'm sure I didn't hide the stunned look from my face very well.  And it was really the same way when I went to Mali.  I don't know how many times people said, "Oh, isn't that where the tsunami hit?" Or, "Isn't that a city in India?"

I don't expect everyone to be an expert at geography or international issues, but is it really too much to ask to just reserve a little space in their minds for places like Haiti?  Especially Haiti, because it has such a history of (not so agreeable) relations with the US.  But I guess, as long as we don't even recognize its existence, then we don't have to acknowledge the detrimental effects that those relations have had on the country and its people.  Early in the 1800's, when Haiti first gained its independence, for decades, the US refused to recognize it as an actual nation, yet we continued to trade with them for sugar, rice, and other products.  And we're essentially still doing the same thing today, pretending that we can't see them there, yet exploiting their labor and land for our own benefit.

And I think, that all of this is why I am attracted to Haiti as an artist.  As a country, in this giant world, it is, and always has been, an outsider.  A tiny little voice screaming in a crowd of people with headphones on.  And what's the point of making art about something that everyone already knows and understands?  Art is pointless if it doesn't communicate some greater truth that forces the viewers to look beyond themselves.  And I, as an artist, am automatically an outsider of mainstream society myself, so a nation like Haiti, is a larger representation of such exclusion.  So I identify with Haitians as outsiders and possibly see their struggle for recognition as similar to an artist's struggle for understanding. 

This weekend, at that trade show, I had a couple of my paintings hanging in the booth near a large display of the Haitians' paintings, and one women came in and really loved the Haitian paintings.  Then another woman that she was with pointed out my pieces and the first woman commented, "Well those are nice, but they're too realistic for me.  I prefer outsider art."  And while I appreciate her interest in my students' work, and I, by no means, expect everyone to like my art, I thought to myself, "someone on the inside needs to make art about the outsiders to show who they really are, otherwise they just get exploited as naive, uneducated neanderthals."  Which, obviously, couldn't be more absurd.  These painters have just as much talent as many people walking around the states with Masters of Arts degrees, they just haven't been invested in, they just haven't been given the opportunities.  It's not naive or primitive, it's just early genius.  It's hungry art.  Made by other humans not that different from you or me.  And that's the point of my artwork, to express the beauty in our collective humanity.


Deserving Existence

Posted by leerainboth on May 30, 2008 at 12:18 PM Comments comments (0)
 Near the end of my time in Haiti, I asked a good friend of mine, Jona Douge, who is one of my art students and a very talented painter himself, what he thought was the most important thing that I could tell people back in America about Haiti, and he simply requested, "just make sure that they don't forget we are here."  This statement proved to me the very unfortunate reality that these people, like so many in the most neglected corners of the world, feel like they are forgettable.  Centuries of being ignored has convinced them that the rest of the world at the least, doesn't care, but more likely doesn't even realize that they exist at all.  And when the rest of the world is sending you that message, then it is easy to begin believing the possibility yourself, that you might not truly exist.  You begin to feel as if the significance of your life on this earth has been eliminated by the poverty that you struggle in.  When everyday, the majority of your time is spent walking miles just to retrieve some dirty water for your family to drink, then it is easy to believe that there is not a greater purpose for you.  When hurricanes don't hesitate to destroy everything that matters in your life, then it seems possible that you, yourself, never mattered much.

A friend of mine who lived in northern Haiti for a short time recently told me a story about a gorgeous beach that was on the other side of a mountain from where he was.  The beach was owned by a cruise company who would frequently take their passengers there, but they would always tell them that it was a "private island" because they didn't want to frighten the vacationers by telling them the truth that it was Haiti.  They thought that they would find it much less beautiful if they knew they were basking in the sun on the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.  These people were getting their tans and playing in the blue waves of the Caribbean with no clue that just on the other side of that mountain was over 8.5 million people living in unbearable poverty.  For their own commercial benefit, this cruise company pretended that an entire nation did not exist. 

But if there is one thing that I truly believe every human being on this planet truly deserves, it's existence.  Every person deserves to know that their life has value beyond their own mind, their own flesh, and the tiny shack that they live in.  So the goal of my artwork has become communicating the existence of those people who have become otherwise invisible through the world's ignorance.  I intend to show that negligence cannot be justified when the people in my art are not all that different from you or me.  There is beauty to be found in every fragment of the world and in the life of every person no matter who they are or where they are, as long as you are willing to open your eyes and acknowledge it.  For Jona's sake, and so many others in this world like him who feel forgettable, I hope that my art inspires the viewer to recognize and forces them to remember.

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