July 2015
Thank you so much for inviting me out to Hawaii as a Visiting Artist. The experience was amazing. It’s the only place I’ve been (besides Egypt) where when I came home, home felt unfamiliar and foreign. To me that’s an indication that the place changed me and the profundity of the effect a trip can have on an individual. It is so different from the experience of a tourist where you stay outside the culture and simply look. You helped me to enter, on some level, the culture and what it is like to live in Hilo.
Of course when I first arrived in Hawaii I couldn’t get over the foliage - the density of the jungle, the height of the trees, the forms of the plants and flowers all so intriguing and unfamiliar and the vastness of the volcano - the sense of the earth moving and alive in a way I had never experienced before. The visual impact was tremendous. And for an artist, who works from the landscape, this is a visual paradise. The opportunity to make work while I was there is priceless. The inspiration of the place is something that will never leave me. And in some ways, I feel it has become a part of me.
I had very little idea of what Hawaii was before we started communicating last December about this trip. And through the books you recommended, and then the people that I met while there, I realized it is so much more than “the pretty postcard” image that most mainland Americans have of it. I’m so glad that my first trip to Hawaii was to Hilo, as I felt I got to see more of what Hawaii really is and not just the tourist version. From talking to demonstrators on Mauna Kea, to having dinner at your home, to casual conversations that popped up with Hawaiians from all walks of life – all of this resonated in a way that other recent travels to say, India and Oman didn’t do. In those trips, I was always a tourist, but this trip allowed me to feel as if I lived there for a little while. And that Hawaii was able to change me, and teach me a little more the real meaning of Aloha. I wasn’t just seeing something amazing, I was also living it.
I loved seeing your work again. The prints and particularly the painting, Breakers. That’s an amazing piece!
Thanks again for inviting me- for your thoughtfulness, and insight, and the opportunity to explore lithography for a little bit. This introduction to Hawaii and Hawaiian culture and thought has been tremendous. Mahalo!
Aloha,
Marrin
1 Written to Michael Marshall, Head of the Department of Art at the University of Hawaii, Hilo.