When she could still count her age on her own two hands, Ha Pham arrived in the US from Vietnam, the youngest of five children and the daughter of a father seeking political asylum. “It was the worst transition,” she says. Pham missed her friends, her cousins and her grandparents, but, perhaps more than anything, she missed the natural beauty of Vietnam, where she would play barefoot in tropical forests of living jade, under mountains looming opalescent through the mist. Now she was in a place called Michigan, near electrocuted by culture shock. It was fall, it was cold, it was gray and all seven of them were living in a one-room apartment. “There was no room,” Pham says. “I had no escape.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY EVAN SIGMUND.
So she began spending her time in the library. She couldn’t decipher the language yet, but she could copy the pictures. Her sketchbook, and fantastical worlds like those in Alice in Wonderland, became her own version of asylum, where she could re-create the freedom of her lost childhood. In the imagery, Pham found quietude in the chaos. In her art, Pham escaped. Not everyone approved. “My mom actually hated it,” she says. In her mother’s eyes, survival was paramount. The family knew poverty, cash was king and her children would find stable careers that brought steady paychecks. “She discouraged me,” Pham says. “She didn’t want me to pursue a career in art.” And though teachers tried to nurture the budding talent by day, her mother would unravel this confidence by night, a fearful Penelope at the loom of her daughter’s dreams. It was one more battle in an age-old war between protective parents and passionate youth. “I was stuck between stability and wanting to be free,” Pham says, “but I would draw whenever I got the chance.” And in 2007, she left Michigan and her mother to pursue art in Sarasota.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY EVAN SIGMUND.
She soon found herself in a place called Towles Court in the studio-gallery of a local artist named Jon Greeley, admiring his portraiture. Approaching Greeley, she introduced herself, said she liked his work and asked to study under him. And for the next two and a half years, Pham would be Greeley’s apprentice, cleaning up the studio, sitting as a model, helping him with the technical difficulties of his burgeoning online business. In exchange, Greeley taught her what he knew of portraiture and working in charcoal, layer by layer, studying value and shade, learning patience and care. “Charcoal allowed me to see,” Pham says.
But she still had trouble seeing herself as an artist—the old doubts and her mother’s words aligning themselves yet again for the eternal–internal conflict with her creative aspirations. What was meant to be a crossroads had become another Sarasota roundabout and Pham was moving in circles, furthering her technique but not progressing where it mattered. She was holding back and she knew it. That was four years ago, and Pham left everything behind once again.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY EVAN SIGMUND.
Armed with nothing but her sketchbook and a backpack, she trekked through Portugal and then Spain and then Italy, searching but not finding, looking in hopes of seeing. But it was a road too well-trodden by artists and seekers of all stripes who had come before, so she stepped off the path. And there, in the wilds of the Dolomites, Pham sat down and began to draw. Surrounded by sage and alpine snowbells, she drew until the light failed and as it got darker she saw she was alone and she heard that she was not alone and she thought she should be scared but was not. “There was only a calmness,” she says. And she knew.
Back in Sarasota today, Pham lives the life of a full-time artist and her studio overflows with portraits, mostly women in motion, their features not merely documented by her brush, but decoded and deciphered to reveal the emotional world beneath. “I want to capture that,” Pham says. “To reach out and grab you.” She’s been a featured artist at Art Ovation Hotel and regularly paints live at Cafe Barbosso, sharing her process and inspiring others to pursue their artistic dreams. She has commissions from clients who encourage her to paint more and more. It hasn’t always been an easy path, and there were nights when she cried—from frustration, from fear, from anger, from despair—but the art has always been its own reward.
“Even if it’s a struggle, it’s still worth it,” she says, “because I know what it was like without it.”On an ideal day now, Pham will wake up rested. She will go for a leisurely walk and enjoy the greens and the reds of the world blooming around her, or perhaps opt for a run on the beach, watching the birds skitter across the sands and scatter into the air, wheeling and soaring, only to recongregate noisily in her wake. Back under the high ceilings of her home/studio, there’s time for tea, stretching and even some meditation. Then, in a space all her own, surrounded by completed canvases on the walls and a million projects in motion, Pham will paint. And she will paint as the outside world of green and red surrenders to muted darkness, as the birds return silently to their nests, long into the night, lost in the color and the shape.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY EVAN SIGMUND.
Twenty years ago, this was unheard of. But this is the new Pham, or, perhaps, simply the real one. She downplays the transformation with a bit of artist-ly wisdom. “The first stroke that you put down is not the last stroke that you see,” she says. And Mom’s finally coming around too. “She’s more appreciative now. It’s progress.”
