I've been holding out on the rest of my sketches from Mongolia and China from last summer because I wanted to do cool things with them. It's getting less and less likely that I will get around to finishing them so I'ma just slap up what I got. Now that I'm done posting sketches from Asia I guess I have to go back to do more...
This is the view from the little kitchen/balcony of the apartment we stayed at in UB. Reason #4,228 why Mongolians are cool: I needed a place to stay with more substantial accommodations so I just asked around my contacts until I found a family that was willing to go spend a week in the countryside with grandparents while we stayed at their place.
I had plenty of time to myself on the 20-hour bus ride to Murun, the only problem was driving over the open steppe made it really hard to draw (and sleep, btw). I decided to go for it anyway and did a few semi-controlled seismograph drawings where I let the bumpy "road" move my pencil and just tried to direct it into some recognizable forms. I can only take credit for half of these drawings, the other half was drawn by the rolling grasslands between Ulaanbaatar and Murun.
Girl on bus
Sky, mountain, dirt road, grass
Some dude's back o' head
Mountain, ger, and two passersby: man and cow
One week later, chillaxin' in New Darkhan with Kjersten
On my second trip to Amarbayasgalant Hiid (Monastery). This monastery famously survived the Stalin-era religious purges. Supposedly the soldiers sent to destroy the complex stopped partway into the deed and decided to leave it be. I was able to sit down and unobtrusively sketch the lams as they read prayers, and Kjersten got this awesome picture of one of the lams looking over my shoulder. A few more of them asked to see the final product when I got up to leave. As a tourist, snapping pictures left and right sometimes makes people feel uncomfortable, almost alienated, but for some reason breaking out your sketchbook bridges that gap and compels people to come closer and see what's going on. Sketching has started off a lot of really great non-verbal conversations for me.
Pencil and paper to the rescue once again! We went to the Russian border lookout in Selenge having been given faulty information that foreigners DIDN'T need to get permission ahead of time from the government building in town. When we realized that going back into town to get said permission would cost another 15,000 tugrugs the soldier at the checkpoint finally took pity on us and said we could go on through as long as we left our cameras with him as collateral and didn't tell anyone that he let us through (be sure to keep it on the down-low, People of the Internet). So no photos of the sweeping vista, but I think I like this representation better.
Earlier I posted a sketch I did of my companion, Khorloo. In the same sitting, after much protesting, I finally got her to agree to do a sketch of me and I just love it. It means so much more to me than the sketch I did of her. She was really embarrassed of it and wanted to throw it away but I wouldn't allow it. I feel a great need wherever I go to make people confront their irrational fear of drawing. It is really silly, although I do understand it myself. I draw ugly crappy things all the time and take whatever means necessary to ensure that they are never seen by human eyes (robot eyes are okay), because making something ugly means that there's ugly in me. We spend a lot of mental and emotional energy trying to hide that fact from everyone else. I don't love this drawing because I think it's the best drawing of me ever, I love it because Khorloo made it! And it IS a good drawing! I can look at it and see what she was noticing about me and how she chose to represent what she saw. It reveals so much more about her than it does about me or the way I look. I know it's scary, but I wish more people would have the guts to put a little bit of themselves on paper. I think more people would find they have a knack for drawing and noticing and creating if they weren't so worried about being perceived as imperfect.
Oh my gosh we're in China! I only did one pencil drawing in China and knew right away that it was all wrong. Mongolia was for pencil and China was for PEN, all the way.
Bridge in Xi'an
Here was another instance where pulling out my sketchbook worked as a social and lingual bridge. I started drawing this kid making Lanzhou lamian, my favorite food I had in China, while at a restaurant and a group of teenage kids sitting at the table next to ours noticed and gathered around and oohed and aahed. My brother spoke to them in Mandarin and found out that they were all art students and one of them ran back to their table and started unfolding this huge piece of paper that was one of their professor's paintings. They explained to me through my brother that this was the style of painting they were studying and then we were all art friends and I loved it.
I drew this tree while my brother played basketball at a university with a group of local b-ball enthusiasts. It was so miserably hot and humid that I don't think he was much sweatier than I was after an hour.
We did a lot more moving around in China and I found it harder to sketch on the go. I wanted to keep up the sketching, though, so I started doing memory sketches at night. Throughout the day I would notice people, faces, and gestures that stood out to me. I tried to quickly memorize and grasp what was unique about them and then hold on to that thought until I got home that night. I could only keep 3-4 of these ideas in my head at once and certainly wasn't entirely successful in recreating what I saw, but at the same time I was pleasantly surprised at some of the things my brain came up with to fill in the gaps.
The view from the Andersen's back porch in Hong Kong.
