Ngay Ta
Artist Ngay Duc Ta brings life to ashes (Story by Suzanne Stroot)
Vietnamese artist Ngay Duc Ta has a gift rivaling any fairy tale magician for casting beauty from waste.
The living room-studio-gallery in his modest Linda Vista home vibrates with lifelike black and white portraits of the powerful, rich and famous. Princess Diana sparkles beneath a gleaming pearl tiara; George W. Bush looks pensive; Bill Clinton grins across the room at a coquettish Britney Spears. Each of these portraits began life as soot.
Using soot as painting powder is a technique Ta developed three years ago when, after migrating to the United States with his family, he decided to again pursue his youthful dream of making a living with art.
His process begins with a burning wick protruding from several lumps of wax in a rice bowl. A piece of wire dangles a noodle cup over the flame, capturing the crude candle's soot. It takes about an hour to catch one-half of a teaspoon, the amount needed for a 10-by-11-inch portrait. Ta uses homemade tools comprised of cotton balls, chopsticks, straws and string-bound paintbrushes to painstakingly bring the sooty images to life. A collapsible cardboard easel he designed holds his work. With powdered smoke as their only source of hue, it's difficult to comprehend the amount of light in Ta's portraits, including the print of George W. Bush on display at the Linda Vista Library.
Water glistens in the President's eyes, Diana's pearls shine. His trick for transforming soot into light? Ta holds up a thin eraser wedged into the split end of a chopstick."Diana's hair," he says, "erased." It's a method which calls to mind Lao Tzu's concept of usefulness arising from what isn't there – in this case, soot – since no portrait can exist without light.
Ta's own story shares a certain kinship with his portraits. Born in Saigon in 1955 and struck with polio at the age of one – which left him using braces and crutches to walk – he became a self-taught artist whose spirit remains unscathed while building a life of beauty based on the simplest of materials and some strong philosophical underpinnings. When asked how he learned to illuminate his portraits, he replies, "My god taught me."
While black and white portraits are his first love, Ta recently has been experimenting with color. To date, he's only completed two color pieces, but their quality is exceptional.
One, "Three Flowers," shows three intelligent-looking androgynous human beings contemplating one glowing blossom. "I painted it to express the idea that each person thinks their perspective is best," Ta explained, adding that failure to value different points of view is "why there are so many wars going on."
The second color work depicts fallen leaves sheltering a young green sprout pushing its way out of the soil at the base of a tree. Because the leave become nourishment or fertilizer for new life as they decay, Ta calls this one "Live wisely," explaining that "I've been living here and seeing so many things I'm disappointed in. Adults and children – they don't care much for others. It's 'What can I do for myself?' That's a waste of life, because all you care about is yourself."
These days his fondest wish (besides making a living from art) is to meet and know more artists he can learn from. "I admire people who have a formal education in art and art history," he says. Well-versed in history, himself, he draws inspiration from the past, especially American history. The first portrait he painted as a young man living in Vietnam was of "Honest Abe."
This reminder is in his tool box:
"Whatever you are, be a good one .
–Abraham Lincoln."
