Urban Sketching with Brush Pens in Taiwan

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Partial Video Transcript

“I’m Professor Lieu. I’m a fine artist working in drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. My parents emigrated from Taiwan to the United States in 1966. I was born and raised in the United States, so I’m a first generation Asian American. This is my first trip to Taiwan and I’m really excited to be visiting family, but I’ll also be exploring Taiwan as an artist and getting to know my Tombow brush pens as I go.

The thing about arriving in a foreign country is that it’s really disorienting, no matter what foreign country you go to. And the thing is I think drawing on-site anywhere, even in an area that’s familiar to you, is already really challenging because you’ve got to deal with the weather, you have to make sure that you have a good place to draw, you got to bring all your supplies and everything so drawing on-site in a foreign country to me is so difficult because there’s a billion factors that you have to deal with all the time.

It took me a good four or five days before I really was able to figure out, ‘okay how am I going to do this,’ because there were some times where we went to this site and I literally had only ten minutes to sit down and make some work. Other times we really had a good half an hour. I had to figure out a system for how to handle all of these factors. I had to know that ‘okay, at any given moment we’d have to get up and go.’

I’m traveling with my family, I’ve got my two kids, my husband, my mom and my dad here. I think it’s important when you’re traveling and drawing at the same time that you put yourself in the right frame of mind.

For example, if you set out and you’re really trying to make super finished, polished, wonderful drawings, you’re just gonna make yourself miserable. You’re going to end up torturing yourself. In fact, I found myself doing that last night. I was going through all my drawings, reviewing them, looking back at what I’d done so far now that I’ve been here for a week, and I started really critiquing myself. I started thinking, ‘oh god, I don’t want to show this one, this is so embarrassing, I don’t want anybody to know that I made this crappy drawing,’ but then I thought, ‘this is pointless, because what am I gaining by bothering myself about not making better work?’

So I think given that the circumstances and logistics of traveling and drawing are so challenging, you just have to really accept the work for what it is and just move on. What’s helped me is to just do a lot of drawing so that for example, in one day, I might do three or four large drawings from a Bristol board; I might do three or four in the sketchbook; and then because I’m producing so much, at least I can hold on to that and not bother myself about the quality of the drawings.

Another thing I really like about drawing and traveling is that it gets you really outside of your comfort zone, because you end up drawing a lot of things you wouldn’t normally draw.”

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