Monks in the Sun

This post, as well as the last one, Sister's in Law are not  new work.  Before I came to the US to live some 15 years ago, I lived in Thailand. I never go anywhere, even now, without my little traveling studio-essential supplies for capturing what I see. I started this when I lived in Chiang Mai because I couldn't walk five feet and not see something I felt desperate to paint.    I would set up my portable studio at a tea stall on the side of the road and paint whatever passed my view.

I had a boy friend in my Taiwanese youth who broke up with me and  became a monk. So the sight of young monks anywhere in Asia fills me with odd feelings. I could not resist these young novices when they passed by. . And I wondered what lovers they were forsaking.

The Painting below-Sisters In Law, was painted when I was 16 living in the Pescadore Islands, part of a Taiwanese archipelago where I worked one summer in a clinic treating Leprosy. After a long day carrying boxes of meds to outlying villages on remote islands, I painted these two ladies waiting for the daily ferry that would take us all back to the main town of Ma Kung.