Christmas Card (2013)

This is the illustration that I did for our 2013 Christmas card. The Lehigh Valley Railroad was where my grandfather worked, and this card brought back a lot of memories for our family.

The Andromeda Galaxy

Last night, Zhicheng and I went out into our backyard, armed with a December star map from ASTRONOMY Magazine.  We looked up into the night sky.   After maybe ten minutes of fumbling and getting oriented, we found the Andromeda Galaxy.

If you know where to look, you can see the Andromeda Galaxy with your naked eye.  I think it's the only galaxy you can see with your naked eye.

On the night of December 26th, the Andromeda Galaxy is almost directly overhead (but you should be facing north).  Zhicheng and I ended up lying on our backs on our picnic table benches, looking up into the sky.  I won't bore you with the details of how to find Andromeda.  You start by finding the constellation Cassiopeia, which is the one shaped like a letter "W".   Star maps and instructions are easy to find on the Internet.

The superlatives about Andromeda just go on and on.  It's by far the biggest thing you can see with your naked eye (100,000 light-years across).  It's also the farthest thing you can see with your naked eye (2 million light-years away).  But it is also the closest galaxy.  The astronomers keep increasing the estimated number of stars in Andromeda.  As of 2013, they're saying it has over a trillion stars.

Don't expect to see much.  The Andromeda Galaxy is just a tiny smudge in the night sky.  But for me, seeing it again every year has become almost a spiritual pilgrimage.  A trillion stars!  I can hear the excited voice of Carl Sagan in my head.  A trillion stars!  And to Sagan, when you have that many stars, most of which have at least some planets, the odds of there being life somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy are favorable.

Anyway, in a world that seems to be 100% human-made, an endless stretch of gas stations, 7-11's and Taco Bells, it seems magical that you can look up into the night sky, and see a galaxy.

Some of My Old Drawings

Here are some drawings that I did, back when I was an art student.  Hope you enjoy them.

 

Carbon pencil on paper  (17" x 14")

 

Graphite pencil on paper (17" x 14")

 

Watercolor on Bristol Board (14" x 11")

 

Graphite pencil on paper ((14" x 17")

 

Graphite pencil on paper ((17" x 14")

 

Graphite pencil on paper (17" x 14")

 

 

 

 

Best Places in the World (but be sure you've figured out how to get back)

For 23 years, I worked for the largest hotel chain in the world, Marriott International.  Mostly because of that, I've been lucky enough to have done a fair amount of travelling.  Many people have told me that I should write down a list of the places I've been to.  It would include many of the most remote, most interesting places in the world.

So, finally, I decided to actually sit down and write out my list.  When I was finished, I was pretty amazed myself.

Here is the list of the most off-the-beaten-track places I've been to.  Reads a bit like the questions in one of the qualifying rounds of a Geography Bee.


(1)  Kashi, China.  You'll think you're in Pakistan, which is only a hundred miles or so away (that's right, China shares a border with Pakistan, though you never think about it that way).  Turbans, long white beards, donkey carts, and the Call to Prayer five times a day.

(2)  St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt.  Greek Orthodox monastery, built around 550 AD, near the site where Moses saw the burning bush.  Hundreds of wars have been fought in the Middle East, over the centuries, but this monastery has survived intact, largely because it is surrounded by rugged desert mountains and it is just too hard to get to.  Somewhere in their vaults, the monks have preserved one of the greatest collections of Greek icons in the world. 

(3)  Cape Dorset, Baffin Island, Canada.  Town of several hundred people.  Language is Inuit.  They live by hunting caribou and ptarmigan, and using nets under the ice to catch arctic char.  One day, our guide took us (on snowmobiles) about 20 miles out of town, where we spent the night in an unheated wooden cabin that he used for hunting.  The next day, an unexpected snowstorm blew in, and we were forced to stay one more night in the cabin.  That was when I had my one small moment of doubt about the wisdom of traveling to the Arctic.  But, not to worry.  We were all wearing so much winter clothing (parkas, sweaters, multiple layers of thermal underwear, etc.) that the below-freezing temperatures were never much of an issue.  We ate steaks from a caribou that the guide had shot a few hours earlier.  Between the caribou and some fish that the guide had caught and a few birds that he had shot, we had enough food to last us a couple of weeks.  The following day, the weather cleared and we left the cabin and returned to town, this time travelling on the ice over the ocean, keeping the snowmobiles maybe a half-mile off shore.  We didn't have GPS, so we navigated by using "inuksuks" (large stone cairns, made to look like an enormous person) as landmarks.

(4)  Hwange Park, Zimbabwe.  I'm afraid to even ask what condition this park is in now, after years of political chaos in Zimbabwe.  When we were there in the 1990's, there were still thousands of elephants.  Our job was to radio-track rhinos (mostly on foot).

(5)  Gorkha, Nepal.  Wait until the fog lifts in the morning.   You will never forget your first upfront and personal look at the Himalaya Mountains.  Leaving the town of Gorkha, we trekked on foot for five days, up and down the "foothills" of the Himalayas, passing through tiny villages linked only by hiking trails.  No roads, no trucks, no cars.  A guy with three yaks carrying bags of salt.  Farmers walking to the weekly market in Gorkha, carrying the food they've grown (and hope to sell) on their backs, in bundles the size of refrigerators, up and down trails so steep I had to grab hold of tree branches and bushes to keep my balance.

(6)  Upper reaches of the Manu River, Peru.   Uninhabited Amazon jungle, pretty much beyond civilization.  We came by boat, up the Manu River.  After an entire day on the river, some eight or nine hours, we had seen a grand total of one house, a tiny grass hut on the banks of the river.  But if you've come to see wildlife, Manu is the right place.

(7)  Kotor Bay, Montenegro.  A tiny country, barely known to the Western world, with an amazing history and culture.  Along the banks of Kotor Bay, you can see concrete tunnels into the mountainside, which lead to an abandoned submarine base, formerly used by the Yugoslav navy.

(8)  Dos Pilas (Mayan ruins), Guatemala.  Accessible only by foot or horseback (we took horses) along trails through the jungle.  The ruins have barely been cleared, most are still covered with bushes and trees.  In its heyday, Dos Pilas was one of the most powerful Mayan cities.   When you look out through the surrounding jungle, in any direction, you see row after row of these strange-looking square hills, all perfectly aligned with each other.  These are actually the unexcavated temples and other public buildings of the ancient city, waiting for future generations of archaeologists.

(9)  Lake Lagoda, Russia.  Enormous Russian Orthodox churches made entirely of wood. 

(10)  Dark Canyon, Utah.  Often ranked as one of the last truly remote areas in the lower 48.  Trailhead is an hour or so drive from Blanding, Utah.  Our group went into this canyon for backpacking.  In five days of hiking, we did not see a single human being.  In fact, the only sign that we were not alone on this planet was the blinking lights of airplanes overhead at night.  You could almost read a book by the light of the Milky Way (okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but you get the idea).  We hiked up into sub-canyons without names, where we found several ancient Anasazi houses, perched up on the cliffs (it was a bit of a trick to climb up these cliffs, I might add).  Some of these houses had 800-year-old artwork still visible on the walls.  I asked why these unprotected archaeological sites had not been vandalized (I'm from New Jersey, so I always expect vandalism).  The answer:  How many people do you think have come up into this particular sub-sub-canyon over the last ten years?  Over the last twenty years?  Maybe nobody.

(11)  The Serapeum, Saqqara, Egypt.  Probably the spookiest place I have ever been in.  This was where the sacred bulls were buried, during the time of the Pharaohs.  You walk down a staircase, into an enormous (but very poorly lit) underground chamber, where there are hundreds and hundreds of large black-granite tombs, each containing the embalmed body of a sacred bull.  Each tomb is bull-size: maybe 6 feet tall, by 8 feet long, by 4 feet wide.  Black granite.  There are electric lights in only a small portion of this chamber.  You walk as far as you can go down one corridor, past maybe fifteen tombs, until the lighting becomes so bad you can't go any farther.  You can see there are more tombs, many more tombs, farther down this corridor (and more tombs  both to your right and to your left, because the whole chamber is arranged in a grid), but there are no lights farther on down, so you have to stop and go back.   

(12)  Lake Manyara, Tanzania.  When I got out of the vehicle, I could see a pink line on the horizon, stretching from way over on my far left. . . . . . all the way over to my far right.  A pink line, maybe two or three miles long.  What was it?   I lifted my binoculars.  It was a flock of flamingos.  Probably a half-million flamingos, the guide said.

North Sea

More paintings and drawings by yours truly.  Sometimes it seems like no blank, vertical surface is safe when I'm around. . . .

"North Sea" (oil on canvas, 20" by 24")(after Keith Shackleton)

"The Sign Painter" (oil on canvas, 24" by 20")(after Norman Rockwell)

"Lily" (oil on canvas, 35" by 28")

"Looking at You" (charcoal on canvas, 42" by 14")

"World's Ugliest Teeth" (ballpoint pen on paper, 6" by 9")(after R. Crumb)

"White Bow" (acrylic on canvas, 18" by 18")

 

 

"Two Finials" (acrylic on canvas, 46" by 65")




Hope you enjoy these pictures!

Great Egret at Bombay Hook

Folks seem to enjoy looking at paintings, drawings and assorted artwork more than just reading a lot of yadda-yadda, talk, talk, talk, etc.  So here are a few more paintings and drawings that I did.

Great Egret at Bombay Hook (Delaware).  Acrylic on canvas, 38" by 50".

This is a female blue crab, called a "Sook" by Chesapeake Bay waterfolk.  Oil on canvas, 24" by 36".

Sycamore Leaf.  Oil on canvas, 24" by 24".

Dangerous Don on a bad day.  Ink on paper.

Dangerous Don on a good day.  Ink on paper.



Hope you enjoy these pictures!

Zhicheng's Published Articles

Zhicheng has published several articles on economics, and in particular on the need to reform the way in which governments make "tax expenditures".   Which is when a government hands out subsidies to favored taxpayers through tax breaks.

http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2006/05/23/000016406_20060523092056/Rendered/PDF/wps3927.pdf