ABOUT L'ART BRUT Về hội họa không trường phái

L'ART BRUT:  RAW ART OR SPONTANEOUS ART -- 

ART OF THE UNTRAINED

The Art of Uyen Nicole Duong:

Artist’s Statement

I call my L’Art Brut “Subconscious Painting,” because quite often, I started out not knowing what kind of images I wanted to create. I usually spent the first 20 minutes experimenting freely with strokes and colors, with no elaborate preparation or concentration. Quite often, after about 20 minutes of exploration, I began to see a theme or an object emerge on the surface – it could be something that I had seen before, maybe just a vague recollection, deja` vu. I then focused on refining and developing that object or theme, or used my imagination to sketch a scene.

Hence, many of my paintings are totally unplanned.

After I finished my first published novel, Daughters of the River Huong, I found myself being drawn toward images that seemed to match the scenes I had imagined for my novel, but this recognition only came either after I had finished the artworks, or half way through the creative process.  So, I decided to name these pieces after the motifs and characters of my novel — that aspect was conscious. However, the beginning of the painting process was still very much subconscious. 

In the subconscious process, I often found that when the images finally emerged, many times, very strangely, the line between East and West became blurred, or the typical images of East versus West were combined in my artworks, totally unplanned.  I could not explain why or how.  I have to conclude that the subconscious mind works in incomprehensible ways. For example, in “The Two Faces of Eve the Vietnamese Dancer,” the image of a Vietnamese woman emerged, but somehow I could not resist the urge to have her wear a flamenco skirt, no longer the traditional Vietnamese ao dai. 

In the final product, she appeared race-less (at least she no longer  appeared Asian, although I subconsciously put an Asian tea set next to her. She wasn't even dancing--the only trace of her being a dancer was her pluffy skirt, full of symbolic movements). Yet, I had started out wanting to paint a Vietnamese dancer. The subconscious mind worked spontaneously, delivering unpredictable results.   

The Two Faces of Eve, a Vietnamese Dancer DNN copyright 2010

I also call my paintings and drawings "the Art of Frugality."  This is because I used whatever I can put my hands on: from classroom markers (I am a teacher-lecturer who likes to draw with markers on the board), to left-over eye shadows and fingernail polish, or scrap papers and old magazine (for my collage). 

For more discussion on Uyen Nicole Duong's L'Art Brut, see also Interview of Duong Nhu-Nguyen by Hoang Lan Chi; Interview of Uyen Nicole Duong by Sandra Sanchez, on the web and reprinted here in this Blog.  
For the complete artist's statement explaining her style, medium and inspiration, click below

L’Art Brut, impromptu creativity, and the Art of Frugality

THE STORY OF A SELF-TAUGHT ARTIST’S

 HANDPAINTED  “POSTERS” AND “POSTCARDS”

Like my character Nam in my novella “Postcards from Nam” (Amazon 2011), I think of my hundreds of paintings and drawings as spontaneously created “postcards” and “posters” to be displayed  modestly in a friendly room or hall, like someone’s apartment or little  corner, so that each piece can speak personally to the individual viewer, as though it were sent from a friend. In fact, I began drawing and painting during the time I was writing Postcards from Nam.

[artwork dedicated to postcards from Nam]

I have never had any formal art training.

The life story:  Like most children, I began making images with crayons at a very young age, but in my case, it was both painting and writing.  At around age 11, I experienced water color, but I used the paint straight from the tube, without diluting it with water, such that the brush felt thick and the lump of color delivered the texture of oil paint. It felt good to my hand.  I then used water color to paint the rice fields of Vietnam.  Those were the sceneries that Vietnamese sixth-graders were encouraged to paint in South Vietnamese public school.  Then, we were taught the primary colors like blue, yellow, and red, or their combinations, and that was it.  (More than two decades later, I returned to Vietnam as a lawyer for Mobil Corporation, and was able to retrieve my first painting in my grandfather’s house.  Now I call  it “the Rice Fields of Vietnam,” and it is hung in my living room.)

We immigrated to the U.S. at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. I worked myself through college and helped support my family (parents and siblings, including my mother who was under chemotherapy at that time). During those early years of our lives in the States, I made a lot of poems, in the hundreds, mostly in Vietnamese. (Today, they remain unpublished.)  Back then, in the late 70s and early 80s, with that modest background, I could not dream of pursuing any kind of artistic career that might lead to an uncertain future.  The focus then was to obtain financial independence in the new society via a marketable career. ]

Several decades thereafter, in the 90s and 2000s, I practiced or taught law as my day job while writing novels at night and on weekends.  (The writing was just as “full-time” as law, although nobody knew about it.  Law may be my profession, but creative writing is my lifetime calling.)  In whatever little time left, I drew and painted to keep the equilibrium.  I know that many literary giants also painted, for example the larger-than-life Victor Hugo.  I did not have the ambition to follow their footsteps.  The visual art was only my quest back to the self, away from daunting cerebral activities in order to find a soothing balance. I like to draw or paint simply because it feels good.  I have had this habit all my life:  When I am alone, if I see or think of something that I like, I usually draw it with my finger into the air, and I alone see those images.  I also do calligraphy, using both Chinese or ancient Vietnamese characters and the Roman alphabet.  My father and my sister also draw and paint.  So painting to me is the gene of the family.  In my case, painting came late in life (in my 40s), as a companion for my creative writing.

The art form called “L’Art Brut”:  Because of the severe lack of time, all I have been able to do is only one kind of art.  After years of painting and drawing on my own, for myself only, I finally learned that collectors did  give a name to what I did. I discovered this name at a privately held lecture given by a Harvard-trained psychologist and art collector.

This kind of art, known as “L’ART BRUT” (the “brute” or raw art by the untrained, or “outsiders’ art”), refers to the  visual creation of people who have never had any formal training in art, yet are inspired to draw or paint simply out of need and intuition. They create their own unique and, at  times, very odd perspective, either at the spur of the moment, or when they are under so much time or life pressure that they must seek the  healing of the visual  art as a form of emotional relief.  L’Art Brut has been found in the least expected places, including hospitals and asylums where art is prescribed to patients for recreation, mental exercise, or simply discipline.

In my case, I use my visual art to interpret and reinterpret my surroundings, to diversify my self-expression, and to communicate my life experience, emotions, dreams, and vision, in a more direct, instinctive, and spontaneous way. (Yet, as a writer, I still can’t escape the allure of the written words, so I found myself painting “words” onto my visual art) (see A Woman’s World, The Prisoner’s Wish, and various personalized images for greeting cards)

One Woman's World DNN C1998

watercolor on paper digitally inverted

How I work  -- subconscious painting.  I call my L’Art Brut “Subconscious Painting,” because quite often, I started out not knowing what kind of images I wanted to create. I usually spent the first 20 minutes experimenting freely with strokes and colors, with no elaborate preparation or concentration. Quite often, after about 20 minutes of exploration, I began to see a theme or an object emerge on the surface – it could be something that I had seen before, maybe just a vague recollection. I then focused on refining and developing that object or theme, or used my imagination to sketch a scene. Hence, many of my paintings were totally unplanned.  When the painting was completed (meaning that I did not feel there was anything else to do to it), quite often I did not understand how I could have created it. One time, I was experimenting with black and red fingernail polishes on white paper, and the image that emerged became what I saw as a caricature portrait of Michael Jackson (right before his death).

 Ten-Minute Caricature of Michael Jackson DNN C2010

enamel and black and red markers on typing paper

Painting Impromptu.  Consequently, I have never thrown away any of my drawings or paintings because it did not look right, knowing that the creation had something to do with my subconscious, or it might represent something I must have been before, a déjà vu from the past, perhaps a piece of memory. (In my novel writing, I used memory recollection as part of story telling.)  Due  to the spontaneous and subconscious nature of this visual creative process, and also due to time constraint caused by my multiple careers, my artworks usually took between 20 minutes (at a minimum) to a couple of hours (at most), although some of the works could at times be quite meticulous (like  the odd images of flat-surfaced “Forest Eyes”).  The majority of my artworks resulted from very quick and unplanned strokes. Accordingly, I also call my art “Painting Impromptu.”

Crayons by N: Forest Eyes DNN C2008

crayons and markers on cardboard

Crayons by N: Forest Eyes Glanced (upside down)

Hybrid of cultures and the connection between the visual art and novel writing.  I did many of my artworks during the two breaks that I took from my law job in order to do creative writing: the first break (late 1990s) was to write my “the fall of Saigon”/Vietnam War trilogy, and the second break was when Amazon decided to publish the trilogy (2010-11).  During these breaks, the long hours of writing, editing, and sitting before a computer screen exhausted me, so I had to draw and paint to diversify. I also turned to the visual art when I had to decide whether to stay with the law or to write novels full time while doing odd  jobs. 

After I finished my first novel, Daughters of the River Huong, I found myself being drawn toward images that seemed to match the scenes I had imagined for my novel, but this recognition only came either after I had finished the artworks, or half way through the creative process). So, I decided to name these pieces after the motifs and characters of my novel The River Huong, and only that part was conscious. The beginning of the painting process was always subconscious. 

In the subconscious process, I often found that when the images finally emerged, many times, very strangely, the line between East and West became blurred or the images of  East and West were combined in my artworks, yet I could not rationalize or explain  why or how.  I have to conclude that the subconscious mind work in incomprehensible ways. For example, in “the two faces of Eve the Vietnamese dancer,” the image of a Vietnamese woman emerged, but somehow I could not resist the urge to have her wear a flamenco skirt, and no longer the traditional Vietnamese ao dai.

  Eve in Repose: Two Faces of a Vietnamese Dancer

DNN C2010 enamel, markers and watercolor on paper

Medium, techniques (or lack of techniques):  Of course I use oil and/or acrylic on canvas like any artist.  However, that aspect deserves no explanation.  I want to talk instead of my “Art in Frugality,” my favorite and unique creation.

In my process called “subconscious painting,” my medium was whatever was available to me at the time:  paper, cardboard, posters, pen, pencil, watercolor, pastel/color chalks, crayons, classroom markers, even left-over eye shadows, lipsticks, and fingernail polishes.  At times, I used what others have discarded in the course of daily lives like carton or shipping boxes, which I cut into pieces to create a surface upon which to draw or paint

Landscape of Colorado Stream DNN C2008

enamel & markers on cardboard  

This is why I also call my L’Art Brut  “Frugal Art.”  In making a choice to use such handy and no-cost material, I often thought of the poverty I had seen in my former home, “Third World” Southeast Asia, as well as stories of Southeast Asian children who had to work odd jobs on the street, or political prisoners who tried to paint and draw with whatever they had in the “Vietnamese gulag” of the 1970s and 1980s (the “reeducation camp” mentioned in  my novella Postcards from  Nam.)  

If I could sit in the comfort of a home to draw and paint, using such “left-over” and “discarded” material, I considered myself lucky.  So, expensive art training and the right art supplies or material is something I can do without.

When I use traditional medium like oil or acrylic on paper, canvas, or wood, again, I often limit  the time I spend on  each piece to only a couple of hours at most, in order to allow my subconscious to speak and dictate what my hand will do.   

I also paint with both hands: right and left. 

Computer-aided technology:  Lately, I have even turned to the technology of Microsoft in order to create the effect of inverted colors. This was an accidental discovery – it occurred while I accidentally hit a button while trying to adjust a photo of my painting in order to email an image to a friend. I am not computer-savvy, and have never used Photoshop or any type of computer-aided technology for any of my artistic pursuits.

Homeland: Viet Girl in Her Back Yard DNN C2010

enamel, watercolor & markers on lipid transparent paper

In order to invert colors into a different color schemes, I have to create the originals in certain schemes of colors.  The process is still subconscious and impromptu, because I simply cannot will myself toward a desired result in terms of colors or tone.  So, each painting, when the color schemes are inverted, is an unpredictable result. Quite often I have no idea in advance how my work will turn out in the “inverted” version. The scheme and combinations of colors of the original artwork determines how these colors can be inverted into different color schemes, so it is still the artist, not the technology, that controls the final visual result.  In my case, that control always occurs at the subconscious level and was never planned.

Pending projects:  Currently, I am planning to change the fences of my backyard into murals as a way to experiment with very large surface and large-scaled perspective, for outdoor display.  Until then, I still want to maintain the informality and free style of my paintings created on smaller surfaces, where self-expression and an aura of personal intimacy are more important than realism. Accordingly, as of now, for me, remaining untrained and self-taught has become a matter of style, and not just the result of my busy life. 

I am also interested in commissioned work as L’Art Brut portraits, when I use my concepts about an individual and express them into abstract visuals that carry meanings like poetry.  That way, I will take my L’Art Brut away from myself. 

Examples of how I created my visual art as an escape from life. As an example of the “impromptu” nature of my art, I did the two “postcards,” Ebony Vase and Interior Opulence, late at night in my office at the University of Denver, after I had taught my evening corporate law class.

During that particular class, I had become depressed by the attitude of some of my students, denoting what I viewed as a possible decline in value among the future generation of lawyers, and a step backward from the beauty of America, which had motivated me for many decades living as an immigrant.  So when I finished the class, I felt the strong urge to draw something very beautiful, yet restrained, to counter my pessimism about the law profession in the U.S.  I went back to my office, taped together two pieces of typing paper to create an 11 X 17 “canvas” substitute, and drew upon the flat surface of my desk. (I was told that real artists should never draw on a flat surface without an easel. Yet, I did it all the time. I drew on my bed and on the floor.)  I then created shapes of leaves and flowers confined in vases in a room, on a flat surface.  I made motifs with a pen and pencil, the kind used in offices, and I filled in colors with fingernail polish and classroom markers. I finished both pieces within a couple of hours and left the office before midnight.

[Ebony Vase] [Interior Opulence] [to be posted later]

Since then, my crowded University office has occasionally become my art studio, in between lectures of corporate law and problem-solving or conferences with law students.  The techniques used (or actually lack of techniques), of course, must have contradicted all good habits of professional artists.  At some point, in the process of this “L’Art Brut” painting process, I spilled fingernail polish on my chair. The janitorial staff reported the “red spots” as “blood,” and the Associate Dean, a man and son of a famous American writer, wrote me formally to inform me that my chair was a health hazard because it contained stains of blood.  I told him that it wasn’t blood but red fingernail polish, since I was painting sceneries with it for relaxation, but he ignored my explanation.  So, the University took my chair away, viewing it as a health hazard!  Nobody seemed to care how the “mystery” of this “health hazard” came about.   

To the best of my knowledge, my old chair has continued to be labeled as a health hazard, something that had to do with “bio-degradable material” that obviously referred to dried blood. I think that despite the advancement of gender equality, there has always been a perception in society that women are biologically vulnerable, so automatically dried fingernail polish is assumed to be “blood.”  If what was on my chair was a health hazard, millions of women around the world have been wearing that hazard on their fingers for years and years. Some of my esteemed colleagues at the University of Denver seemed to refuse to acknowledge that, in between my long hours of teaching and services as an academician, I, a person with no art training, have turned to the creation of “raw art” with left-over fingernail polish!  This is so “outside the box” that these colleagues of mine do not want to know or acknowledge that this oddity exists among them.   

The use of left-over fingernail polish and eye shadows as media for painting:  This “health hazard” story also relates directly to the reason why I came up with the use of various combinations of fingernail polish as my medium. The explanation has everything to do with the fact that I am a Vietnamese woman.  In the past few years, stand-up and improvisational comedians have imitated the Vietnamese accent spoken by the women  who work in Vietnamese nail salons.  These comical clips are now all over youtube. They also generate awful anonymous comments posted for public display on the internet.  Local TV networks, especially in California, have also done coverage of these nail salons, showing hard-working women from Vietnam working in this service industry. These women often speak limited English with a heavy accent, usually just nicety phrases spoken to their customers. At the same time, there has also been news coverage regarding the conditions of hygiene, health and safety in these salons, and a number of them have been closed down by government inspectors as “health hazards.”  So, lately the nail industry and these salons have become the public image of Vietnamese women, both in a positive and negative way, against our own will. 

The reality is that for decades after the fall of Saigon, the nail salons have provided a source of income and economic independence for many Vietnamese families since the early 1980s, when women in America were first introduced to false acrylic nails.  A number of Vietnamese have become quite wealthy thanks to the nail industry. Yet, in  these nail  salons, there are also many Vietnamese women working very long hours, often 13 hours a day, seven days a week, wearing cotton masks to keep themselves from constant exposure to the chemicals.  One can easily smell the acrylic powders and the various chemicals in these places.

I have been going to these nail salons for years for a sense of “coming home” and not necessarily for their service.  Unless I speak Vietnamese to them, the woman workers do not know that I am Vietnamese. Watching these women in the colorful world of nail polishes -- hundreds of bottles -- I picked up the idea that I should use left-over polish to paint.  Then I learned to mix colors and create new colors with these polishes by diluting  them in fingernail polish remover, a chemical substance with  its unique chemical smell very familiar to women all over the world.  (I also learned to mix classroom markers’ colors that way, a very intricate and difficult process.) 

Women know fingernail polish colors and the addictive smell. These substances have been women’s friends forever, and now, via the comedians’ jokes, have become part of the “Vietnamese working-class female identity” in America.  In fact, it is now part of the Vietnamese female worker’s identity all over the world and not just the U.S. -- in  the fall  of 2010, I was in Paris for my educational research, and sure enough, in Arondissement No. 13, the Asian neighborhood of Paris, I found the Vietnamese nail  ladies in their tiny little shops, with the same chemical smell that goes into acrylic nails.

The brushes in fingernail polish bottles are for painting nails; they are not meant for artists.  It is very difficult to draw lines or curves with these very short and uncomfortable brushes. Yet I used them because of the trembling vulnerability of the thick lines and curves that they produce. But I think that long-term use of nail polish brushes will destroy the adroitness needed for oil-on-canvas or silk artists.  So today I also use watercolor brushes with the enamel found in fingernail polish.

After my experiment with fingernail polish, naturally I turned to left-over eye shadows and even lipsticks.  I used my fingertips for eye shadows, and I used lipsticks the same way I used chalks or markers.  However, since cosmetic materials do not last, I did not use them that often. Where I used left-over cosmetics, I applied a coat of clear fingernail polish over those images colored with eye shadows or lipsticks to help retain the colors

Winter Rose DNN C2008

markers, enamel, pastel, lipstick crayons on cardboard

In my “early retirement” years, I may decide to study art at some time in the future. With or without formal art training, I still want to explore and discover new media in an unconventional way. The “frugal” approach of using the “left-over” cosmetics in a woman’s world was just a convenient and painless beginning, as I tried to communicate beyond the written words.

I don’t know what the future holds for my visual art.  I am over 50 now, and my eyes only function at about 50% capacity due to very bad nearsightedness.  (For years and years, I used my eyes for the written words and computer screen at least 16 hours a day).  Careful ophthalmologists have given up on my eyes and do not want to perform Lasik on me.  Now, when I paint, I feel that I am only seeing with one eye.  Yet colors dance in me and before me, all the time.

I have seen so much in my life in my journey from East to West, from Vietnam to America and then back to Southeast Asia, as well as other parts of the world via my corporate and Fulbright assignments.  Besides the beauty and power of the written words, vibrant colors, as well as all those emotionally trembling or fiercely darting lines and curves, have always been my vision of the human experience and its eternal hope. 

UDN copyright March 2011