Tag: art

East Hampton artist says, “Always have a project you love to do”

Nicole Bigar in New York City on July 16, 2015. (Photo/Kristina Puga)

“I used to spend hours on the rocks watching the waves splashing, smelling seaweed, collecting shells…,” Nicole Bigar wrote briefly about her strict childhood in her 2011 book, “Koukoumanias,” which is a colorful conglomeration of her then 45-year career as an artist.

To this day, she loves nothing more than the ocean and creating art. It was painting that consoled her when she was a new arrival to New York.

Bigar immigrated from Paris to New York City, during World War II. She was 14. In between high school and college, she took time to study anatomy and drawing at The Arts Students League. Later, she studied philosophy and Spanish at Barnard College.

“Then I had children. When they went to college, that’s when I seriously became a painter,” says the 88-year-old. “I met my husband in New York when I was 17. I got married when I was 19. He just died.”

And it is art, which is again helping her heal – this time from losing her husband of 65 years. Her love of art has been a part of her as long as she can remember.

“I always wanted to sketch, look at beautiful work – I see beautiful things around me – especially nature,” says Bigar who spends her winters living in New York City, and her summers in East Hampton. “I want to do paintings that I have never done before. I travel a great deal. Everytime I go to a country, I like to paint it. I’ve been to Egypt, Norway, India…and I’m still very attracted to the beauty of France.”

Presently, she says she’s painting a whole series on Times Square.

“When I went to the theater, I was fascinated by the lights,” Bigar recalls. “So all winter, I’ve been working on that. I might do a book with it.”

In her current show, “Muses: Past and Present,” exhibiting now through the July 26 in East Hampton, Bigar says she used ceramic, sand and paint on canvas in creating her pieces of art.

A piece in Nicole Bigar’s current exhibit “Muses: Past and Present.”

“My inspiration was that I love East Hampton,” says Bigar. “I love to give joy. People look at my paintings and it makes them happy. I use a lot of bright colors. Painting is my happiness, and whatever happens, if I’m not feeling well, or I’m aching, it helps my morale.”

She adds that one of her muses in her current exhibit was inspired by a continuing education class at Barnard College about French novelist Marcel Proust. She started to paint a lot of characters from his novels.

“I think the secret to getting old is to be interested in something beyond your day to day life, and then life is not boring,” says Bigar, who also loves to exercise and swim. “You always have a project.”

She says when she was younger, she always had a lot of things to do. When she was married, as well. For her, the advantage of her age is that she can now devote all of her time to painting.

Her one piece of advice to her younger self:

“Always have a passion. Always have a project that you love to do. Always learn…Also, slow down once in a while and meditate and live in the moment.”

And for a long and happy marriage:

“As my husband became older, I thought I don’t need to take care of him – I want to take care of him. I then did my best to have him have a happy life.”

July 22, 2015
The co-founder of P.F. Chang’s shares his recipe to success

Co-founder of P.F. Chang’s Philip Chiang (Courtesy Philip Chiang)

Philip Chiang always wanted to be an artist, but life had other plans for him. At 67, he is the co-founder and consultant for the 200-plus Chinese restaurant chain, with a nearly $1 billion revenue, P.F. Chang’s.

Chiang’s parents left China in 1949 to flee Mao Zedong’s communist dictatorship, and so Chiang spent most of his childhood in Japan. At 14, he migrated, with his mother and sister, to San Francisco’s Chinatown.

He credits his success today to his mother, Cecilia Chiang, who has been nicknamed “the mother of Chinese food in America” and is also winner of the 2013 James Beard Foundation Award for lifetime achievement.

Cecilia Chiang, 95 (Courtesy Philip Chiang)

At a time when the U.S. was only familiar with Cantonese cuisine, she introduced Mandarin cuisine of Northern China by opening the Mandarin restaurant in the 1960’s.

“She wasn’t a restaurateur – she just somehow got into it,” says Chiang proudly about his mother. “She became very successful and well-known – so things worked out. I think the intention was just to pay the bills.”

He goes on to explain that his mother was the seventh daughter of an aristocratic family. She grew up in a large courtyard home characteristic of upper class families, but the family lost everything during the Chinese Communist Revolution.

“She’s a survivor,” says Chiang, who learned most things, including recipes, from his mother.

While he was an art student in Los Angeles, Chiang used to help his mom out at the Mandarin, when it moved to Beverly Hills.

“I was the busboy and did miscellaneous stuff around the restaurant,” says Chiang, not knowing at the time how that would come in handy later on.

The experience actually inspired him to open his own restaurant, reflecting his own personality – simple and laid back. He called it Mandarette.

“It was a more casual, younger cafe,” says Chiang. “I liked the fancier food that my mom had, but I craved more everyday food – casual dining, instead of fancy that my mom was doing.

He opened Mandarette in Los Angeles where, he says, everyone is on a health kick.

“The food was lighter fresher, more health-oriented…and that’s what attracted people,” says Chiang.

As luck would have it, one of his customers there was Paul Fleming – owner of the famed Ruth Chris Steakhouse. Fleming became a big fan of Chiang’s food and asked him to help him open up a Chinese food restaurant in Scottsdale, Ariz. That was the first P.F. Chang’s which opened in 1993.

“It was never meant to be a chain,” recalls Chiang. “After we did the first and second one, there was still no thought to do a chain. It just kept expanding, and we went along with it, and it grew.”

The Los Angeles resident says what he believes led to the chain’s success is that they serve the Chinese food which he himself likes to eat.

“Clean and simple,” says Chiang, who is now helping P.F. Chang’s with its international expansion when he’s not pursuing his art career (he just joined Instagram with the name “ChiangPhilip” to display his latest paintings inspired by nature). “I’m still doing the same thing 20 years later.”

He says being a restaurateur is a very difficult career, but his recipe to success is simple:

“In the end, I think people don’t need something different, just something really good,” says Chiang. “Very few people can do something well – even if it’s just a burger, or a salad – just do it really well.”

February 25, 2015
93-year-old former plumber memorializes toilet seats through art

Barney Smith (Courtesy Facebook)

Barney Smith is a retired master plumber from Alamo Heights, Texas. At 93, he still treasures the trade that was passed down to him from his father by memorializing damaged toilet seats.

Every day, Smith goes to work in his garage to create art on toilet seats. He houses all of his works of art there as well, as he refuses to sell any. There are so many currently in his garage, that it is now known as the Toilet Seat Art Museum.

“Number 1,156 is the one I’m working on now. I’ve been working on it for several days,” says Smith who spurts out the toilet seat pieces by number, as well as the significance of each, with ease. “I have a catalog, but I have memorized many…”

Smith has made toilet seat art with everything from state license plates to sea shells. He gets inspired by experiences he wishes to remember, and the materials he has available at the moment. Sometimes visitors come by and bring him materials to work with. He says once he even had a visitor came from Seoul, Korea who stayed for three days.

“I get a bunch of stuff, and I say, ‘Okay, what am I going to do here?’,” says Smith, saying his latest project developed because a scooter club member walked in with a light bulb and some spark plugs.

Smith says joyfully that it takes him anywhere from 20 to 200 hours to completely adorn one toilet seat cover.

“It took me 200 hours to find rocks in the Rio Grande River and polish them,” remembers Smith as sharply as if it were yesterday. “My wife and I spent hours on those rocks. We went all the way to Laredo to try to find some pretty ones.”

He says he’s traveled a lot – from NYC (for appearances on “The Today Show,” “The View,” and “The Montel Williams Show”) to the Auschwitz concentration camps in Poland.

“I wanted barbed wire from the concentration camps,” says Smith. “I put it in my pocket and took it home, and put it on a toilet seat – that was in 1995. In 1996, we went to Germany and saw the Berlin wall, and all the way down to Austria. We saw the mountains from ‘The Sound of Music’…I picked up a rock and nail from the Berlin Wall and two flags, and I put a piece of the rock from one side of the wall, and the piece of barbed wire on a toilet seat. I’ve got a lot of history hanging up in the Toilet Seat Museum.”

Smith says he got the idea to use toilet seats as his canvas when he was still a plumber. He had gone to the plumbing supply house to purchase materials for a job and noticed a pile of slightly damaged toilet seats that were going to be discarded.

“I took about half a dozen toilet seats to my apartment,” remembers Smith. “I went back to the job, and when I got through that night, I started my artwork. I went back and showed the manager of the store what I was doing, and he told me I could have them all. So I had almost 50 seats to start out with.”

Until this day, Smith says he calls plumbing supply houses for damaged seats. Sometimes, people even bring them to him.

Smith says he gets so many visitors that he now only opens up by appointment only.

“I can’t afford to open up every time someone passes by in their car,” he says, taking his work seriously. “I got someone saying they want to come by this weekend from Georgia.”

Smith says he still has lots of energy to keep making his art, and if he is lucky to still be alive in May, he will be making his 94th birthday seat.

Barney Smith’s birthday toilet seats. (Courtesy Facebook)

“I have two decades worth of birthday toilet seats,” says Smith, who tries to fit all of his birthday cards for each year on each birthday seat. He has three daughters, seven grandchildren, and 12 great grandchildren.

If he had one piece of advice to give his younger self, what would it be?

“I have been married for 74 years. I lost my wife a year ago,” says Smith, adding he met her at the age of 18, and she was 17. “I advise to keep God in the arrangement. Anything that comes your way, ask the Lord if this is His will, or don’t do it. That will keep you together..If God is in the arrangement, you will want to stay together. Our long-lived marriage is because of God in the arrangement. That is my advice to anyone.”

December 16, 2014
NY artist says to make your life a masterpiece, listen to yourself

Artist Carol Crawford (Photo/Carol Crawford)

Carol Crawford, originally from Buffalo, NY, has been creating art ever since she can remember. She inherited her talent from her father – an artist and calligrapher.

“I used to watch him work,” she says. “He did gorgeous lines. He handed me a bottle of India ink when I was seven and a sable brush. I never spilled anything.”

And that’s how it all began.

Crawford has had a long art career consisting of documentary photography, filmmaking, printmaking, and theater set design. In 1995, she got a masters in interior design from Pratt Institute in NYC – where she has been teaching since 1999. Slightly before that, she also founded her own design firm, Carol Crawford Environments, which specializes in sustainable interior design. And on October 7, her latest exhibit, “Time Frames: Visual Metaphors for the Passage of Time” opens in New York.

“All the work was done in 2014,” says Crawford about her latest exhibit which she completed while on medical leave from Pratt. “I had spinal surgery, and it took a long time to heal. I thought I would go out of my mind, so I decided to throw myself into studio work. I plunged in. It was an evolution from designs from my sketchbook.”

She says what she loves most about art is the ability to communicate and to invent.

“What I like about it is telling stories,” says Crawford. “I’m looking always to break new ground. It’s mixed media, because I love to shift. I’ve used a lot of wood and plexiglass, and photography has always played a large part. I used to make a living as a documentary photographer – so the camera is an important tool.”

Whatever she has worked on throughout her life, she says, she has loved. And she also made sure to make time for everything that was important to her.

“I’ve been teaching in universities and colleges from California to Maryland for the past 60 years…I love teaching very, very much, but I didn’t want to give up the idea of becoming a mother,” says the busy woman who now has four grown kids and five grandchildren. “…One of the things I had to fight for was to have children and a family – so it means a great deal.”

Crawford says she wasn’t always so sure about what she wanted. One day her father asked her why she didn’t go to Pratt?

“We were not rich,” she remembers. “I was always a scholarship student with a job. I thought, ‘How could I do that?’”

And then her mother asked her, “Wouldn’t you like to be a designer? You keep doing it for free?”

Crawford says she didn’t know how she could go back to school with four kids, and she recently realized it all happened. She had actually graduated from Pratt and is a designer and teacher.

“Some of the best ideas I’ve ever had was using my brain with my feelings,” she says. “Some of the best artwork has come from that as well.”

If she had one piece of life advice that she would tell her younger self, it would be to be true to yourself, others and stick to your dream – even if you don’t know how you are going to make money.

“If you haven’t already fallen in love with something…listen to yourself,” says Crawford. “If you are an honest observer to life around you, you’ll come up with something that is true to you. You will have success if you do that.”

October 1, 2014
Tejano sculptor says he’s always ready for his next challenge

Armando Hinojosa (Photo/David Hinojosa)

Armando Hinojosa is a proud Texan, born and raised in the southwestern city of Laredo. His family has inhabited the Lone Star State as early as 1755.

He calls himself “a Tejano,” because his father came from Mexico and married his American mother, who was a direct descendant of the founder of Laredo, Don Tomas Sanchez. But perhaps what makes him even more proud, is the fact he dedicates each day to carrying on his late father’s work as an artist – and he does so with love and careful attention to the slightest detail.

With more than 40 years of experience, the 70-year-old has sculpted bronze pieces for Sea World, Boy Scouts of America, as well as the largest monument at any state capitol in the nation – the 11-piece, life-size, Tejano monument in Austin. On September 6, his statue of Gil Steinke will be unveiled. He was the head football coach at A&I University for 22 years and the first to recruit Black and Hispanic players, according to Hinojosa.

Hinojosa working on the Tejano Monument. (Photo/David Hinojosa)

“I love all my projects, and I put my whole heart in each one, but the one that has given me the most respect is the Tejano Monument,” he says. “Three-fourths of the Tejano Monument is made up of Hispanics…We were here before any Anglos were here. We’ve been here for 500 years.”

The energetic Tejano says every project he receives is a new challenge for him. Although, he loves every piece he works on and puts his full attention on each one, he never dwells on the past once he’s done.

“I gotta move on,” he says. “I gotta work for the future now. I’m ready for something new.”

Hinojosa excitedly mentions the Cotulla Convention Center in South Texas has already booked him to make a life-size sculpture of the city’s founder, Joseph Cotulla.

“I do everything in clay,” says the busy sculptor. “You can buy it green, grey, or brown. Then I send it to the foundry where they make a mold…a five foot statue will cost about $30,000 and three months to make, but it’ll last forever.”

He explains it took him 12 years to finish the Tejano Monument, because it took that long to raise the funds.

Ever since graduating college, teaching had been Hinojosa’s primary source of income.

“I married my wife, and we had three kids,” remembers Hinojosa, stating fondly that his wife was an award-winning teacher. “I was a teacher seven or eight years, then I started in the arts.”

After opening up his own gallery and running it for about five years, he says he went back to teaching another 10 years, at the end of which he was hired as Dean of Art for a new arts high school in Laredo.

“I was there for 20 years. I would get up at six in the morning, work in my studio till eight, then go to school,” recounts Hinojosa. “I was never lazy. I was doing both, but when I got the Tejano Monument, I quit and I’ve been doing art since.”

These days he spends his days sculpting, and his nights painting cowboy or Mexican themes, with either watercolors or oils. He says he is often reminded of when he first started his career with his dad.

“He would paint billboards,” says Hinojosa. “My dad would draw the letters, and I would paint the inside….Then I went to high school. While other people had jobs in stores, I was helping my dad paint the signs outside.”

He says his talented dad is still known throughout Laredo by his first name, Geronimo. Years ago, he had been hired to do props for Hollywood, but he didn’t go, because he didn’t know English. Geronimo only had a sixth grade education, but Hinojosa is very grateful for the invaluable lessons he passed down to him.

“Have a dream and stick to it,” Hinojosa says is one of those lessons. “You have to pay your dues. You have to keep at it. When I first started, I didn’t paint or sculpt like I do now. I was born with it, but I also learned from my dad.”

September 3, 2014