Hokulea is a canoe that began as the dream of an artist and became a movement and inspiration for an ocean of people.

Herb Kane, who started all this, passed away at the age of 82.

The double-hulled canoe Hokulea started a Hawaiian renaissance.  This was before my time, but the stories of this canoe that connected islands across the vastness of the Pacific, that rescued the art of traditional navigation from the brink of extinction, that in this age of technology found its way using only the stars the waves, the currents…  it held in my mind.
I painted it.

The story of Hokulea begins with an artist’s vision.  A canoe like this hadn’t been built for centuries.  The Hawaiians had stopped voyaging the almost 3,000 mile trek to Tahiti by the time Captain Cook arrived, so there was no modern documentation.  But Herb Kane dreamed of canoes.  He researched, designed, and showed his painting around Honolulu until he had gathered the support to have it built.

Hokulea spent the last months on dry-dock with hundreds of volunteers caring for her.  Alongside the news of Kane’s passing, is the news that Hokulea’s repairs have just been completed.  The canoe has returned to the ocean and is readying for an around the world journey.

The stories we tell, the art we make can make a difference. It can live on.

I never met him, but his work stuck constantly in my mind.  When I taught art at Pomaika’i Elementary School in 2010 I told his story to the students.  Herb Kane’s historical paintings illustrated their textbook, but to know who he was, and that art and history and stories are all ripples overlaid on the same ocean–that was something more than the textbook held.

We made our own Hokulea canoes.

Top painting Wa’a, by Herb Kane.  The others are my own, 2007-2008.

This was the view from our second Chiang Mai apartment.

There was a Burmese temple across the road.  Doi Suthep is the mountain in the background.  The shape of its ridge, combined with the trees and white apartment building in the distance reminded me of certain views of  the West Maui Mountains from Kahului–complete with cruise ship in the harbor.  It was a comforting resonance between homes.

We were in Chiang Mai during the peak of the rainy season when Bangkok became a waterworld, and our town’s own small Ping River broke its banks for a couple days.  The vegetable market shifted back a block.  The supermarket sandbagged its doors.  Locals in the flood zone built cement-block barricades you stepped over to enter their stores.

In this sketch, the river is a foot from breaking its bank at the flower market.

As the water drained south, the town changed again.  People mopped the mud out of their shops, and everyone hung fantastic lanterns from the eaves of their homes and businesses.  Over a week, the excitement grew.  Visitors and escapees from Bangkok flooded the town.  People purchased fireworks…big fireworks.  In Thailand you don’t need a permit to host your own 4th of July extravaganza.

For four days there was the constant din.  The pyrophiles took a nap between 4:30am and 5:30am then started up again.  There were parades, pageants,  parties.  The crowds were thickest around the river bank.  Here, especially if you could find a pocket of space, was where Loi Krothong was really celebrated.  People clutched small rafts made from a round of a banana tree stalk and decorated in leaves and flowers.  They whispered prayers  for ancestors and family, prayers for the river’s benevolence, prayers for the future, and sent their float down the River Ping.

As the rafts floated, lanterns lifted up.

The shops had been selling  plain white lanterns–basically a wire circle with white paper to be unfolded into a large bag.  I had ignored them because I couldn’t tell what they were.  These came with small paraffin cans.  When lit, they filled the lantern with hot air.  People held onto the edges of the glowing lantern, along with their family, their friends, feeling its gentle upwards pull.  They made wishes.  At the right moment, they let it go.  It rose up, and while its particular spark lasted, their  lantern was one of thousands of golden stars drifting above the city.

Late into the night I sat at our apartment window and watched the lanterns rise and drift.

People are the same everywhere.  We all want to rise and shine with our hopes.  We all only glow for so long on this planet.

_______________________________________________________________________

I’ve been thinking of this, and gosh-darn, I’m just going to start.

If you’d like a hand-drawn post card, send me your address.

Every day I’m going to draw a postcard.  It might be a sketch.  It might be a doodle.  It might be in color.  It might be in pencil.  But I will draw one every day, and I will mail the postcards whenever I find a good post office.

Send your address to:   postcard (at) sutrovgallery (dot) com

If you have a friend who would like to do this too, let them know.

I’m just heading off to bed on my last day in Laos.

We were in Luang Prabang for two weeks, and I’m busy drawing up the adventures we had there.  Right now I’m in Phonsavan, home of the Plain of Jars and literal tons of rusting missile shells left over from the years the US bombed the region.

In the morning: a 10-hour bus ride, and northern Vietnam.  And I will draw postcard #1.

Here’s something for you in the meanwhile.

This is the Nam Khan, the smaller of the two rivers that border Luang Prabang.   (The other is the mighty Mekong.) The bridge in the painting is wooden, with creaky metal supports.  There’s no room to walk on the vehicle part of the bridge, so they tacked on an extra section for pedestrians, rather precariously.  Later, after I had walked across it, I think I overheard a tour guide say it was built by the Americans back in the 50′s…  eek.

I much preferred the bamboo bridge we took back across the river.  That one’s reconstructed after every rainy season, so upkeep is more regular!

** Your mailing address will only be used to send you your postcard.  I will email you to let you know when your postcard has been sent.  You may get an extremely occasional email from me (read once or twice a year) if there’s anything super-exceptionally new happening over at Maggie Paints the world.  But only if it’s very cool.

Here’s to Art and Adventure!

Ian, the Wizard of the Internet Cafe…

Until we sorted out the internet at our apartment, we often made use of the wifi cafe.   The place was full of characters, and Ian fit right in.

Yes, it’s been over 9 months in Southeast Asia.  Nine months of walking around whatever city we’re in, shopping at the local market, walking back to the current apartment, enjoying the sights and sounds of the neighborhood, cooking up whatever we purchased.   (We perplex the tuk-tuk drivers.  We always say “Sabai Dee!  Hello!”   We rarely accept a ride.)  All this walking gives Ian lots of time to say interesting things.

Our current neighborhood, in Vientiane, Laos, is around the corner from Patuxay, featured in the first panel.  It’s a giant Arch du Triomph-style monolith, built out of cement the USA donated for an airport runway back mid-century.  The rest of the neighborhood is a mixture of government office buildings and family-run restaurants that are buzzing at lunch time when all the offices empty out.  Lunch is serious business here.   In the evening, the restaurants double as open air living rooms as the families relax, wash dishes, and play cards.

And, a doodle of the two of us, wearing our hats.  We look a bit perplexed, like we’ve just arrived somewhere new.

New!  I’m posting short comics of stories from our travels.

I am still working on the main Maggie Paints the World Comic.  And that will begin updating regularly very soon.  In the meanwhile, there are so many other little stories that have happened while travelling.   The truth is, if I was’t such a sucker for color, the main comic would be much further along.  Instead, it’s coming along slowly, but beautifully.

Now, you will have the best of both worlds.

He came out to visit us in Vietnam, his first visit back since the war.  The modernness of Ho Chi Minh City amazed him, as did how little of the countryside had changed.  Except for the mountain.  What had been a place of bloody confrontation was now a temple, and what could be best described as an amusement park.

Here is a painting of one of the temples, with the misty mountain behind.  To get there we rode a ski-lift style gondola up the mountain through a torrential downpour.  To get back down the mountain you could choose the gondola, or the roller-loge.

Our favorite hotel in Ho Chi Minh quickly became the Blue River Hotel.  It’s a small guest house in a back alley of Pham Ngu Lau, a part of the city where many travellers end up.

The best thing about this little guest house?  The staff.

This is our friend Hien.  After watching me work on my comic she asked me to draw a portrait of her.

Ian had purchased an English-Vietnamese picture dictionary.  Hien sat with us for hours, teaching us to say a few words in Vietnamese.  (This is a tough language to pronounce!)  She enjoyed the book so much that we gave it to her.  We’ll have to go back for more lessons next time we’re in southern Vietnam.

Angkor Wat is still #1 on my list of places to revisit.  After Cambodia we were in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam for a month, then back to Chiang Mai, Thailand.  Now we’re in Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

We keep spending longer and longer in each location.  I’ve been creating a backlog of art (and comic!) to post.  It’s time I’m back on this site and putting it out there.  Regular comic updates coming shortly… as soon as I can wrangle a very busy web-designer to tweak his girlfriend’s site.

It was hard to pick the one view I’d spend my time concentrating on, and then just as I did, every tour bus at Angkor pulled up outside.  The scene changed completely.

What to do…spend my time at Ta Prohm sulking at everyone blocking my view?  That seemed like a waste, so I drew the scene as it was, with everyone in it.

The temple of Bayon is crowned with the monumental faces of King Jayavarman VII who built so may of the temples.  When you first see the faces, they’re towering over your head, but it’s possible to ascend to their level.  The sketch was done while we holed up under an archway during a rainstorm.

It soon dried up, though, and we braved the stairs, constructed to make you cower and climb in this realm of the gods.  Once at the top, the faces surround you.  Some silently meditate, and others have the open eyes of the omniscient god-king.

One day we went to some fantastic temples that were a bit further away.  I tried to paint at the first one, but there was no shade.  I’ll have to come back to Baneay Srei some day, preferably when the sun isn’t right overhead.  Luckily, the second temple, Banteay Samre, was beautiful in the afternoon light, and even better, we had the place all to ourselves.