Mudmen of New Guinea
I went trekking in Papua New Guinea in 1981. Most of the time I was in a region where foreigners rarely went (the territory of the Kamea people.) But I was also in the Highlands, much more popular with travelers. There, the Asaro Mudmen did a ritual combat performance, their bodies coated in gray mud for a ghostlike appearance, dancing in silence, wearing mud-clay masks over their heads. I sketched them as they danced, and then did some sketches of the tourists to amuse the Mudmen.
Inner Mongolia and a Yunnan fire truck
In the mid-1980s I traveled extensively around China. Here are three sketches I did in Inner Mongolia, including a ger (yurt) and a horse that I rode there. The fire truck was in Dali, Yunnan Province.
Tibet and Sikkim
My camera was broken when I traveled in Tibet in 1984, so I recorded what I saw in a cheap sketchbook with a fine-point pen. I often had quite an audience of Tibetans watching me draw. Later I used several of the sketches as the basis for paintings. These selections from my Tibet sketchbook include scenes from around Lhasa, Gyantse and the plateau to the north, with pilgrims from the still-nomadic Golok and Khampa people. I've also included some pages from a notebook I used while leaving Tibet by bus. The color picture is a watercolor sketch I made of the interior of a Buddhist monastery in Sikkim, bordering Tibet, in 1992.