PAPER DEMON, HONG KONG

Paper Demon, Hong Kong, 12 x 9 inch ink and watercolor by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE

In 1986 I was working on the first exhibition at Evanston Art Center of my series A Year in the Tropics: Images of Vietnam by George C. Clark.  In that first version of the show I included images from the two 5-day R&Rs I got during my tour, visits to Hong Kong and Singapore.  I showed a few of my photographs and I painted a street scene from Singapore and this drawing of ladies putting the finishing touches on a paper and bamboo demon for a street festival in Hong Kong.  The series or parts of it have been exhibited in various venues since then (including the Thompson Center in Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum and the National Veterans Art Museum), but in subsequent exhibitions I didn't include the Hong Kong and Singapore material as being not quite germane to the Vietnam War experience the rest of the art dealt with.

I made the Paper Demon ink drawing on paper that wasn't suitable for watercolor, so I used the silkscreen printmaking process to transfer the drawing onto a couple of sheets of illustration board and hand-colored both of them, producing two similar but not identical paintings.  This enabled me to include the image in an exhibition of travel art at the same time as my A Year in the Tropics show.