Ngay Ta

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."

Ngay Duc Ta was born in Saigon, Vietnam. He became a victim of polio when he was one year old. He has loved drawing and music since childhood and is self-taught.

Ngay immigrated to the US with his family in 1999. After a 20 year absence, he is again working at his art using candle soot as a medium. He began his art career by drawing portraits and now also does realistic still life.

In 2004, Ngay was a member of the San Diego Museum of Art's Artists Guild.

January 7, 2003

Smoke from a candle's flame helps soothe the soul of Ngay Duc Ta. It is the lifeblood of his main love – painting.

And nothing puts him more at ease than working on his art.

But where some artists paint in charcoal or ink, Ngay does it with soot from the smoke that collects in a small tin cup he holds upside down over a burning candle.

He does it, too, with "paintbrushes" he fashions out of cotton balls, pen shafts, thin sticks and plastic straws.

Ngay, a struggling artist with a family to support, came up with the ideas for the unusual materials and the unusual tools three years ago.

He was searching for an inexpensive alternative to the hard-to-find painter's powder he used decades ago as a kid growing up in Vietnam.

He's an inventive man of simple tastes who also writes music and plays classical guitar. Through his 18-year-old daughter, Giang, who acts as interpreter, Ngay says: "I like that I can take something considered waste and use it to make something beautiful that inspires the heart."

And his work certainly does that.

Ngay's portraits – his favorite form of expression – are so lifelike that they appear to be recently snapped photographs.

The sharp contrasts and the fine detailing in such works as his President Bush, his Princess Diana or his rose in full bloom can make you feel almost as if the subject is in the room with you.

It's all the more remarkable when you consider that the 47-year-old Ngay, who has coped with polio and its aftereffects from age 1, is self-taught in music and art. And until three years ago, he had not painted a thing in two decades.

He put painting aside then to do what seemed more effective at keeping his family fed in his native land: He and his wife of 22 years, Hien Kieu, designed and sold printed T-shirts for a living.

Eventually, in 1999, they came to America, seeking to give their three young kids a better run at life.

In their view, opportunities, especially those in education, were extremely limited for their children in war-ravaged Vietnam, and reuniting with relatives in San Diego would be best for the kids.

They knew that it would be hard sledding in a strange new land.

But they wanted their kids to be more than they were: two T-shirt sellers, struggling to make ends meet amid a shaky economy, yet suffering the effects of a decades-old civil conflict.

Giang, Ngay's firstborn child, acknowledges that her father knew best, although times have been hard in high-cost San Diego.

"I love my father. He's very understanding and supportive," she says. "He's super smart; a (stickler) for details. And he always has good advice."

Sometimes the wisdom is hard to see. The five-member family is crammed into a tiny two-bedroom home in a low-rent corner of blue collar Linda Vista.

Ngay, who speaks limited English and gets around with the aid of braces and crutches, finds it hard to get full-time work.

Hien paints nails in a salon to support the clan. The pay isn't much, and relatives have had to kick in on occasions.

But Giang and her two brothers, ages 13 and 8, are exceptional students with lots of promise.

And although it's been hard getting his work noticed, Ngay stays high on the idea of supplementing the family income through the sale of his paintings.

The Linda Vista Library has kept Ngay's Bush portrait on display for six months. They have been extremely helpful, doing everything from fielding inquiries about him and his art to helping him follow up on leads.

All the support helps keep his resolve strong, as do lessons from the past.

Ngay's family, in which he was the sixth of seven kids, could never afford special schools.

So as a teen, after falling in love with drawing in third grade, he taught himself techniques from books. He did the same thing after classical music began to share his fancy some years later.

Today, he can reflect: "When you love something – like I love drawing – you never forget it. And when you do it, you try to do your best at it no matter what."

And that makes it pay off in the deepest places.