Citizen Sketcher

Welcome back for part two! Traveling further afield from Siem Reap, visiting the distant temple complexes.

[Ta Prohm’s small 4 face gate. An iconic sight, common to all the temples]

As you head outward from Siem Reap, the various temple complexes become less ostentatious. Some are as small as a single building in the forest, or an empty reservoir moat with a fallen down tower.

Probably the most well known from film and photography is Ta Prohm. This exotic site is overgrown with giant trees whose roots are often bursting through the stone walls. It’s probably my favorite of the temples – though it does not have the most impressive sculptures or architecture.

The place is bustling with workers setting up scaffolding and carrying on reconstruction. But with the constant encroachment of the trees and vines it seems like it would all vanish if they took a week off. Swallowed up by the forest.

It makes you want to rush around, sketching everything madly. Like you have only a limited time to capture everything because once you leave it’s going to be gone for good.

In fact, the experience might well be gone for a different reason. This is our second time visiting. The first trip was in 2002. We could see what tremendous difference the reconstruction makes. Things become safer. No more heaps of disembodied figures waiting to be sorted and re-stacked.  No more scrambling over mossy stones and into leaning corridors that might easily collapse on your head.

Sorry to be ‘that guy’ saying how it’s never going to be the same. But really – you should just get out here and see it soon! The sites have gone from a few thousand visitors a year, to over 2 million of us playing Indiana Jones. One way or another, that much attention is changing things.

To talk about painting for a moment. In general with these sketches, you’ll see me working to simplify.

To distill the immense complexity of the carved structures and surrounding vegetation into a painted impression. A set of silhouettes.

With this one, I knew I wanted to record the complete feeling of the place. This was the one image I’d planned to get from the start. The whole trip was made to get here.

I probably spent over two hours at this spot. Not that long for a plein air painter, but quite a while for a sketcher.

I think of the mass of the tree canopy almost the same way I might paint clouds. It seems ‘all in one shape’ now, but it was grown out carefully from the edges of the buildings.

I had the most fun leaving out the negative space for the tree roots, then coming back to paint them into the reserved white. It brings the image suddenly into focus when you drop in the final puzzle piece.

Painting in the rain. There was a lot of that this trip. One day I will work out a way to wear an umbrella on my back, in the manner of the soldier’s flags in a Kurosawa samurai film.

For now I’m just tying it onto my backpack straps (Flimsy). Or holding it in the same hand as my drawing board (Very awkward). I’ve also tried lashing it to a monopod and holding it in the crook of an elbow. That works, but you have to carry the extra monopod.

All these jerry-rigs are highly susceptible to wind-gusts. So nothing is perfect.

By the way, this also works for painting under intense sun. I did a few sketches in Italy with an umbrella sticking out of my shoulder bag.

I’m starting to hate sun screen, but I also worry about melanoma. If you’re going to be out in the sun for weeks at a time, that’s getting to be a real concern. Something on the list, to be worked out in the future.

This is the South Gate of Angkor Thom. The rows of stone soldiers on the bridges reminded me of Chinese Terracotta warriors.

They are meant to be holding up a giant serpent, but the horizontal sections of the snake have fallen away. Probably to be restored soon.

When we were last here years ago, there were classrooms of kids being taught stone carving. I’m sure the idea was to plan ahead, to grow the craftspeople that are stewards of these national treasures today.

Finally, The Bayon. This tower is the best location for 4 face heads. You can climb up to the top and get eye to eye with the giant stone faces.

From a distance, if the lighting is not right (midday, or overcast), the place is really just a jumble of rocks. You have to be conscious to create organized blocks of color and value. Work to separate objects which in reality are camouflaged together.

That being said, this painting is very much ‘artistic license’. Not really a faithful representation. But who is to say? It doesn’t look like photographic reality – but the sketch will be how I remember it :)

As you read this we are probably starting the first day of painting in the Algarve. We’ll be away for a couple weeks, so I thought this is a chance to post something from the archives.

Let’s go back to last July’s trip to the Khmer temples in Siem Reap Cambodia.

Immediately after the 2015 USK Symposium in Singapore, we spent a week touring with some of the other workshop instructors. I’m sure followers of Urban Sketching blogs remember the coverage from people like Suhita Shirodkar, Stephanie Bower and Shari Blaukopf.  At the symposium I’d been teaching about sketching people at high speed. But we’d also been exploring the city in our free time, getting used to the realities of painting in extreme humidity.

By the time the official programs were over, I was excited for the next leg of the trip – but I also felt like half a burned down candle.

Big workshops are an overdose of activity – all of the painting and drawing, combined with the social buzz – it can be exhausting. So the plan for Siem Reap was simply to paint every day. I wanted to do nothing else besides exploring the temples with my watercolors. No doubt there are other things to do in town. There are local arts and crafts, there’s dance and theater. There is great local food. Certainly there are fascinating markets full of street life and exotic goods. But by then I was into my zone of simply painting for myself.

So what can I say about visiting Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples that hasn’t been said before?

When visiting any great archaeological site, we are reminded that no matter how impressive our modern accomplishments (the iPad being the greatest I can think of right at the moment) humans have been constructing epic monuments for thousands of years.

The level of artistic achievement and the complexity of the engineering are so astounding that the modern mind isn’t even able to take it seriously.

[Painting Angkor Wat from the east side]

Think about the generations of effort invested in transforming the landscape on this scale. The huge reservoirs dug out of the jungle, the massive stone temples with every surface covered in sculpted carvings. I have a hard time imagining how it could be accomplished.

With any of these places – the great pyramids in Egypt or the Mayan and Aztec cities in Mexico – we have been tempted to revert to magical thinking. “Chariots of the Gods! These must have been made by aliens!”

In our modern society, where we can’t even agree to vaccinate children, it seems like cooperative effort on this scale is something out of the question. Something humanity may never see again. You get the feeling, when walking here, that this is a thing we have lost. We may never again see a culture reach these artistic heights.

I don’t mean to be romantic about it. I’m sure the reason ancient kingdoms were able to build this way had everything to do with theocratic dictatorships and the iron rule of warrior kings. You probably need a huge population of let’s-just-call-them-slaves. There is no time to worry about universal health care and education. Never mind the OSHA.

But it’s easy to brush that aside when you’re there, and simply marvel at the place. I often wonder, if these beautiful complexes were actually used by the people – or if they were gated palaces only for the privileged few. Who got to see these miles of relief carvings? Who was living in these halls lined with row on row of statues? Was it only a few saffron robed priest-kings living in luxury? or were the stone courtyards packed with people, animals and wooden houses – a chaotic village crammed inside the walls? Today it has an abandoned feeling. I prefer to imagine these empty places packed with a riot of color.

If you spend any time in the modern day temples in Siem Reap, you get a sense of that barely contained energy. The way every inch of space is used for color and decoration. There are very few solemn monastic courtyards in the bustling streets of a living Asian city.

[Wat Prea Prom in Siem Reap]

Next week, I’ll carry on with sketches from the more distant temples. Stay tuned! ~m