Amelie-An 15 Canvas Print

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this painting belongs to "Amelie-An Series"
Artistic Statement for Amelie-An Series

Amelie-An was born in Can Tho, South Vietnam in February 2008 with a cleft lip/cleft palate and was abandoned as a new born infant. I came back to Vietnam in December of the same year ( for the first time since 1975 ) to adopt her as a child of special needs when she was 10 months old. By the time she was 2 years old, she went thru 2 painful surgeries to correct the problems￿.but that is not all. The doctor said she will need 3 more major surgeries by the age of 10 to fix the rest of her palate, lip, and nose. Now at age 4, with speech therapies and going to pre-school, she has major problems with talking since she can￿t feel the inside of her mouth very well.

From the moment I saw her lying there in that little crib at the orphanage until now, I felt a great deal of empathy for Amelie-An, perhaps because I went thru a chain of events of misfortunes in my early life...

I was born in Saigon, Vietnam. Being very shy, I spent much of my childhood hiding away upstairs painting, instead of playing with other children. My first brush with success was a Best of Show prize at the 1974 children's exhibition in Saigon sponsored by UNICEF. In 1975 Saigon fell and in the resulting confusion I was separated from my parents. I ended up in a refuge camp near Hong Kong for a year prior to immigrating to the United States as an orphan. After one very snowy and cold winter in Pennsylvania, I went to Los Angeles to stay with some relatives. During my high school years, I earned extra money doing fashion modeling work in the garment district and upon graduation started on the pre-med program in college. During this...