The Shadow Knows - drawing #6

October 21, 2010, 9:00 pm

By JAMES MCMULLAN

Line by Line is about rediscovering the lost skill and singular pleasure of drawing.

Tags:

drawing, shapes

This is the sixth in a series.

Probably the first thing we notice when we observe an object is its shape. This is an enormously useful characteristic because it gives us an immediate impression of the spirit of the subject.

Think of the shape of an elephant. Its mass and tree-trunk-like legs suggest the slow, unstoppable movement of the animal. Contrast this with the shape of a grasshopper, whose delicate antennae and jutting-back legs suggest a more nervous, fast kind of energy. Responding to shape is the first step in our logical and intuitive search for the meaning of what we draw.

James McMullan CLICK TO ENLARGE

If responding to shape is a fundamental aspect of seeing an object, it also interacts with all our other perceptual responses in helping us make sense of our subjects. When one is actively observing a subject in order to draw it, the mind is ping-ponging among different visual responses, shape-to-color-to-contour-to-shadow-to-proportion, and from those purely “eyeball” calculations to all the memory and psychological associations we have about our subject.

This ability of the mind to intermingle all our different kinds of reactions enriches our response and strengthens each part of that response. Shape is made more meaningful by seeing color and volume, and particularly by our recognition of our subject’s “thingness” — what makes an elephant an elephant, for instance. Understanding the significance of each part of a shape — seeing that the bump behind an elephant’s head is where the strength of the shoulder reveals itself and is different in nature from the soft curve of the belly — helps us to draw lines that evoke various kinds of energy. This is in contrast to making a contour line that moves around a shape as though each part is equal, like a neutral diagram. What we want from each stage of the drawing is to try to answer more and more of the question, “How is this thing different from every other thing?”

I include a watercolor drawing of a tap dancer to show how the silhouette of a figure can convey a particular vitality better than the details themselves.

James McMullanCLICK TO ENLARGE

In the process of drawing a shoe and a chair, I will show you how you can see their shapes as part of your response to their functions, and as the beginning of a much richer mental game than contour alone. You can either draw the shoe and chair from the photos or find a shoe and chair of your own to draw, following my steps.

James McMullan CLICK TO ENLARGE

I begin by thinking about how I put on a shoe and how I walk in it. In the drawing I made over the shape of the shoe (at right), I emphasize the aperture that the foot uses to get into the shoe, the embracing forms of the instep, the heel and the toe, the point at which the ball of the foot hits the ground and the flexible area on top that gets wrinkled by the constant bending of the material. At this stage I am ignoring all the logos and surface designs so that I can concentrate on the fundamental issues of how the shoe is made to accommodate the foot and its function. In this way, I have enlivened the shape of the shoe in my mind so that different parts have different qualities and it is no longer like the map of a country I have never visited. This analysis (which you can make by simply thinking about the shoe and without diagramming it) will guide me in making a more detailed drawing of the shoe.

James McMullan CLICK TO ENLARGE

As I start, I am still thinking about the large enclosing areas that I emphasized on the silhouette shape. I first make the bottom line of the sole where the pressure of the ball of the foot is exerted — it feels to me like a basic aspect of the “walking” function of the shoe. Then I make lines that enclose the heel, toe and instep, and a looping line that begins to describe the aperture of the shoe. Even though these lines form a kind of contour, I have tried to make each of them express the particular kind of pressure and implicit volume I feel in that area. This is in contrast to a contour line that simply describes an edge by moving evenly around the shape.

These first lines are especially important because, just as in the drawing of the lily, I am choosing among the myriad details I am seeing to find the issues that seem particularly central to the function of the shoe and, in that way, I take charge of the drawing.

James McMullan CLICK TO ENLARGE

Now I make volumetric lines around the heel and below the instep to establish the larger forms of the shoe. I add more detail to the aperture and the laces. As much as possible, I try to use the design details to reinforce the three-dimensionality of the shoe, even trying to imagine what zoomy, wrap-the-foot feelings the designer had when he decided to make these particular shapes. As I draw, I see that I have slightly missed the chunky proportions of the sneaker, so I make correctional lines around the top lining to make that part higher. A drawing should feel like a live, open-ended experience in which you can amend your lines as you absorb more and more of your subject.

James McMullan CLICK TO ENLARGE

This is the finishing stage of the drawing, and I concentrate on strengthening the roundedness of the forms, adding more volumetric lines around the area at the ball of the foot, heel and toe. I add darks to the surface the shoe sits on to give it more spatial presence and to set off the white color of the material. As I draw the designs on the surface I hold back slightly on their darkness so that the graphic elements won’t overwhelm the sense of form in the whole shoe. This lack of logo enthusiasm on my part helps the drawing to maintain it’s unity, but it probably won’t lead to any phone calls asking me to do product illustration.

James McMullanCLICK TO ENLARGE

The happy guy at ease in the furry chair represents the beginning of my thinking about drawing the chair. I let the idea of sitting register strongly in my mind as I look at the chair — I can imagine what the seat and the back feel like as I sit, and remember the trust I put in chair legs to do their job stoutly and not collapse. I think of soft chairs and hard chairs and put this particular chair in the medium- hard category. The design of the chair slots into 1940’s English no-nonsense with some mild Art Deco around the slats. A likable bourgeois seat from which to eat your soft-boiled eggs. This little common-sense exercise helps me to see the chair as both a chair-chair as well as a specific chair, anything but a neutral shape. The lines I have drawn over the chair silhouette emphasize these core functions of sitting and support.

James McMullan CLICK TO ENLARGE

I start the drawing by making the rectangle of the seat, then the line describing one side of the back and the connecting leg. Next I draw two lines delineating the near front leg. Now I have implicitly set up the position of all four legs. As you see from my red lines, the rectangle on the floor is anchored by the two legs I have drawn and echoes the rectangle of the seat. My basic sense of perspective helps me to draw the lines so that the elements recede. Part of the satisfaction of starting the drawing in this way, is that it’s like the answer to a puzzle — how do I figure out in the most efficient way where the ends of the legs are?

James McMullan CLICK TO ENLARGE

Once the positions of the various rectangles that comprise the chair are pinned down, it becomes a matter of adding the details so they are both where they should be and they also retain the character of this specific chair. As I draw the legs, for instance, I think about the difference between the edge of a sawn wooden piece and the same part of a chair if it were made from an extruded steel pipe. They are both straight, but the wood has a certain softness in it’s straightness that the steel would not.

It may seem odd to think about different kinds of straightness, but a sensitivity to the materials that an object is made from is one of the things that I believe experience in drawing will lead you to. In the final stage of the drawing I use cross-hatch shading to bring out the sturdiness of the chair and the flatness of the seat — the qualities of structure and “sittingness” with which I began.

Learning to understand the structure of a shoe or a chair and be able to draw it in a straightforward manner gives you the basis to consider those objects (or any others) in a more personal and intuitive way. These two paintings by Van Gogh resonate with the memories and associations that this pair of boots and this chair had for him in his life.

Vincent van Gogh A Pair of Shoes, 1886

Vincent van Gogh Van Gogh’s Chair, 1888

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Mother Nature Decoded - drawing #5

By JAMES MCMULLAN

Line by Line is about rediscovering the lost skill and singular pleasure of drawing.

Tags:

drawing, fantin-latour, klimt, nature, trees

This is the fifth in a series.

Mother Nature can look very chaotic. When we take a walk around a garden, every flowering bush can seem like a confusing explosion of blossoms and leaves, every tree like an impossibly complicated tangle of branches and foliage. How can we possibly draw these verdantly overflowing subjects without going blind, or crazy?

Well, the truth is that drawing or painting the actual complexity of a bouquet of flowers or a patch of forest with precision is a high-level observational and aesthetic task that, for the moment, we will leave to artists like Henri Fantin-Latour or Gustav Klimt. We can, however, take a single stem from that bouquet and choose single trees from that forest to look at and find a way to draw.

Henri Fantin-Latour, left; Gustav Klimt, right “Roses,” left. “The Birch Wood,” right.

Many people learning to draw have an understandable anxiety about getting the proportions right. The skill of drawing proportionally comes from doing a lot of drawing, but also from combining the search for correct proportion with the all the other ways that we think about our subject as we draw. In the following analysis of a flower I think you will see that responding to fundamental issues in looking at the flower help us to draw the proportions of the plant much more easily than concentrating on each part of the plant as we come to it.

James McMullan

A good place to start is to acknowledge that this lily is a growing plant moving upwards to get nourishment from the sun and rain, and that its central stalk is a strong column that supports the out-springing stems, leaves and flowers.

In the first stage of the drawing I establish the direction of the stems and leaves and the centers of the petals as they bend away from their core. Two things strike me as I make these lines — one, that the curves of the stems and leaves have a rhythmic relationship with one another and two, that the petals form an almost symmetrical “fountain” as they burst from their center.

In choosing to start my drawing in this way I have decided on a priority — that establishing the basic growing direction of each of the elements gives me a more coherent foundation on which to build my drawing than starting with any particular detail. This is an enormously important insight in drawing — if you start each observation of a subject by deciding what is most important to its character, you will know where to begin your drawing and how to proceed. In the case of the pot you drew, its series of ellipses stacked on a central core was the key to its structure. In this lily you are considering something much more organic and subtle, but still with a logical structure.

James McMullan

In stage two of the drawing, using the first lines as a guide as to where the centers are, I choose to finish the two petals on the far side of the flower because they are the easiest to understand and give me more reference points to complete the other petals. Again, using the first lines as a guide to where the center of the leaves are, I draw the twisting forms of the leaves, registering what is the underside or the top side of the leaf.

James McMullan

In stage three of the drawing I have established enough of the architecture of the plant to draw the details — the thicknesses of the various parts of the stalk and stems, the stamens inside the flower and the unopened buds. At this point I could keep working on all the other aspects of shadow and atmosphere, but you could do that without me. I’ve walked you through the important part of the initial thinking where you might have been led astray by details.

Photo A

James McMullan Photo B

Trees, with their hundreds of thousands of leaves and branches reaching every which way, are daunting subjects to draw. But just as we thought about the growing pattern of the lily to help us organize the details in our drawing, we can observe in each individual tree clues as to what makes them look like they do.

One of the most useful clues is the leaf of the tree itself, because examining it gives us a sense of the large shape of the tree and the kind of texture that the limbs and groups of leaves create. I have chosen two trees from the yard around my house to consider and to draw. They are both Japanese maples, one an unusual coral bark maple (Photo A), the second a more common split leaf red maple (Photo B). In the close-up photos of the leaves, you will see that the leaves of the coral bark are slightly pointier and thrust outwards more than the leaves of the red maple, which are softer-looking and curl downwards.

The different character of the leaves helps us to understand the overall shape and texture of each tree. The coral bark’s silhouette is spiky, with large indentations in its mass, echoing the vigorous pushing-outward energy of the leaves and the deep spaces between each of the leaves’ five segments. The feeling of the whole red maple is softer and rounder with fewer big gaps in its perimeter, just like the broader, downward-curling leaf.

James McMullan

Start your drawings by sketching out the large shapes, quickly giving the tree the general character of spikiness (in the case of the coral bark) or roundness and softness (in the case of the red maple). As you proceed to map out the big masses of leaves, keep using the appropriate kind of line, jagged and up-thrusting for the coral bark, and round and downward-arcing for the red maple. The coral bark’s leaves feel like they are arranged along the outer branches to form long, spear-like protrusions, whereas the red maple’s leaves feel like soft, rounded clumps.

Rather than trying to draw individual leaves, use the characteristic spiky or rounded line to evoke the whole texture of the tree. You are drawing the overall character of the tree, not a rendering for a horticultural textbook. Even when you use groups of lines to quickly develop large shadow areas, keep thinking of the kind of edges and shapes that you see in that particular tree. The red maple, for instance, has a kind of fussiness that you could reflect by using lines that jig and jag around and that have a sense of downward-pointedness. The coral bark’s shadow areas can be developed with patches of angular lines that move upward and outward.

Drawing the lily was a more precise observational exercise because we could look at a relatively simple subject up close. The tree drawings were a way to generalize the central character of a more complex and larger subject that we were observing from more of a distance.

However, with enough patience, and finding a tree you love to observe, it is quite possible to do a “portrait” of a particular tree, and I encourage you to find that special tree and to have the experience of drawing it with concentration and particularity. Mother nature may often seem impossibly chaotic, but sometimes she can be pinned down. I include here a drawing of a tree that attracted me in its wintry starkness.

James McMullan

In the next column, we will draw two manufactured objects that require a somewhat different approach.

The Three Amigos - drawing #7

October 28, 2010, 9:00 pm

By JAMES MCMULLAN

Line by Line is about rediscovering the lost skill and singular pleasure of drawing.

Tags:

alice neel, cezanne, composition, drawing, painting, still life

This is the seventh in a series.

There is something particularly satisfying about setting up objects for a still life painting. It’s like a little world that you control. First you get to choose the inhabitants — maybe a vase, some flowers, a weird gourd, a plastic Mickey Mouse, your baby shoes — and then you get to move them around like a potentate.

Of course, this opportunity to combine a mélange of objects can lead to a too-complicated visual mess. There are a few fundamental decisions to make before you start a still life: deciding on how many elements to include, how to arrange them so that they overlap in a good way and how to position the objects to create not only a satisfying aggregate shape, but also ensure that the negative space is interesting.

© The Estate of Alice Neel, Courtesy David Zwirner, New York Alice Neel’s “Symbols (Doll and Apple),” c.1933

Paul Cézanne

We have many models in the history of art to help us think about still lifes. Cezanne and his apples immediately leaps to mind. His art, like the painting I include here, demonstrates how to build a complex but harmonious arrangement. Thinking of still lifes that are a bit more quirky, I show an early painting by Alice Neel that is full of strange psychological emanations. Some contemporary artists, like Wayne Thiebaud, arrange their objects in grid-like patterns. This style of echoing modern mass production dispenses with the old idea of compositional charm altogether.

Many artists have chosen to paint still lifes simply to represent some idea of beauty rather than to make any particular narrative point, yet even the most “neutral” painting of apples or roses tends to suggest the abundance of life or its transitory nature. Too, the relationship of objects in a still life almost inevitably brings to mind the relative status or kind of connection that the objects have with one another.

The doll at the center of Neel’s painting dominates the apples and the glove, whereas the three apples in the bowl in the Cezanne seem protected by both the bowl and the drapery, and guarded by the two outlying apples. I may be making more of a point about the implications that arise out of still lifes than perhaps Cezanne or the other artists ever intended, but I do it to show that the choice and arrangement of objects in a still life is less neutral and more interesting than you might have expected.

Although I am specifically dealing with the idea of a simple still life here, the issues of the relative scale of elements, what goes in the foreground or the background, the rhythm of shapes and the effect of light and shade would be as pertinent to a composition of figures in an interior or a landscape, in fact any kind of complex image you can imagine.

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I have chosen three objects: a dark glass vase, a bowl with apples and a cream pitcher. I will paint these objects in five different arrangements to show how the objects can overlap each other gracefully and how each arrangement affects the proportions of the picture, the negative space and the character of the objects’ relationships.

James McMullan CLICK TO ENLARGE

In the photograph of the objects the vase is in the center, and even though the effect is of a school lineup, the vase is definitely the tall student in the class, and, despite the curves, possibly a bully or a mean girl. The arrangement is satisfyingly symmetrical and the rectangle of the picture is spacious enough to hold the three elements comfortably. In the painting just above, I have moved the vase to the left, possibly the head of the school line, and made some adjustments to the picture. I moved the white cloth that the objects sit on so that it cuts the foreground at an angle, roughly echoing the angle of the slant of light in the background. This balances the optical heaviness of the vase on the left, and enlivens the negative space in the picture. In these exercises I am making these paintings in very limited, almost monochromatic color, to keep the emphasis on the composition.

James McMullan CLICK TO ENLARGE

I now move the pitcher slightly forward. The group starts to feel more integrated — as though they have started some kind of dialogue. I include the line drawing that was scanned at an early stage of the art to show both my adjustments to the drawing and to the rectangle of the picture. I have also highlighted the significant intersection of this composition — the place where the pitcher overlaps with the fruit bowl. It was important to move the pitcher enough in front of the bowl so that the curve at the bottom of the bowl didn’t start to ride up the front edge of the jug. I also made sure that the spout of the pitcher was above the rim of the bowl to make a visually satisfying relationship between the ellipse of the bowl and the hooked shape of the spout.

The general rule about overlaps is that they should clearly move one shape in front of the other and should avoid two shapes, particularly curves, just touching each other. In the painting’s background, I darken the area at the right to help balance vase on the left, and I adjust the white cloth to allow a little of the table edge to show along the bottom. That dark bar visually stabilizes the composition. The shadows cast by the objects help to connect them and to bring a sense of light atmosphere into the image.

James McMullan CLICK TO ENLARGE

I scanned the line drawing at a moment when I was using the space relationship between the spout of the pitcher and the curve of the vase to judge the position of the pitcher. This was a clearer point to me than using the base of the pitcher to figure out where it sits in the field. I adjusted the rectangle after I realized that I needed more space on the left to match the space on the right. In the painting, the shadow cast by the vase on the back wall becomes a significant factor in the feeling of the whole picture. It both dramatizes the top lip of the jug and it further separates the jug from its companions. Now the jug poses a question and one apple leans forward skeptically. The vase is mute.

James McMullan CLICK TO ENLARGE

Uh, oh! Poor juggy had too much heavy cream at the party last night and he’s not feeling tip-top. Artist James is also having a little trouble with the proportions of the rectangle, but after four tries he gets it right.

In the intersection of the jug and vase it was important that the curve of the spout clear the base of the vase. It creates a little negative shape that is more interesting than having the two ellipses pile on top of one another as they would have been if the jug had been higher in the composition. Comparing the drawing with the painting you can see how much the tone of the back wall and the cast shadows help to pull the elements together.

Another reasonable alternative to this formation would have been to have the jug lower down, clearing the shape of the vase altogether.

I hope this will encourage you to choose three relatively simple objects and try some different compositions. It will give you practice in drawing objects and getting a feel for how one particular relationship of shapes can feel wrong, and yet one that’s only slightly different can feel right, right, right!

The fact that the rectangles I drew in these exercises were not accurate, or that I had to change them as I proceeded, does not take away from their usefulness in my mental process. Drawing the rectangle free-hand as a first step makes it come alive in my thinking in a way that simply accepting the edges of a drawing pad as my “field” would not. That first movement of my pencil or brush to choose those four edges as the space in which I will make my future choices is as much a part of my drawing as all the other lines I will make.

I suggest that in making compositional sketches you draw a rectangle on your pad as a beginning step, rather than always planning your composition using the full area of the pad. You might want to consider a bigger pad than you usually use to give you more possibilities in the shapes that you can draw.

In the next column I will investigate how to analyze the forms in drawing heads.

China Spreads Aid in Africa, With a Catch

September 22, 2009

Uneasy Engagement

By SHARON LaFRANIERE and JOHN GROBLER

WINDHOEK, Namibia — It is not every day that global leaders set foot in this southern African nation of gravel roads, towering sand dunes and a mere two million people. So when President Hu Jintao of China touched down here in February 2007 with a 130-person delegation in tow, it clearly was not just a courtesy call.

And in fact, China soon granted Namibia a big low-interest loan, which Namibia tapped to buy $55.3 million worth of Chinese-made cargo scanners to deter smugglers. It was a neat illustration, Chinese officials said, of how doing good in Namibia could do well for China, too.

Or so it seemed until Namibia charged that the state-controlled company selected by China to provide the scanners — a company until recently run by President Hu’s son — had facilitated the deal with millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks. And until China threw up barriers when Namibian investigators asked for help looking into the matter.

Now the scanners seem to illustrate something else: the aura of boosterism, secrecy and back-room deals that has clouded China’s use of billions of dollars in foreign aid to court the developing world.

From Pakistan to Angola to Kyrgyzstan, China is using its enormous pool of foreign currency savings to cement diplomatic alliances, secure access to natural resources and drum up business for its flagship companies. Foreign aid — typically cut-rate loans, sometimes bundled with more commercial lines of credit — is central to this effort.

Leaders of developing nations have embraced China’s sales pitch of easy credit, without Western-style demands for political or economic reform, for a host of unmet needs. The results can be clearly seen in new roads, power plants, and telecommunications networks across the African continent — more than 200 projects since 2001, many financed with preferential loans from the Chinese government’s Exim Bank.

Increasingly, though, experts argue that China’s aid comes with a major catch: It must be used to buy goods or services from companies, many of them state-controlled, that Chinese officials select themselves. Competitive bidding by the borrowing nation is discouraged, and China pulls a veil over vital data like project costs, loan terms and repayment conditions. Even the dollar amount of loans offered as foreign aid is treated as a state secret.

Anticorruption crusaders complain that secrecy invites corruption, and that corruption debases foreign assistance.

“China is using this financing to buy the loyalty of the political elite,” said Harry Roque, a University of the Philippines law professor who is challenging the legality of Chinese-financed projects in the Philippines. “It is a very effective tool of soft diplomacy. But it is bad for the citizens who have to repay these loans for graft-ridden contracts.”

In fact, such secrecy runs counter to international norms for foreign assistance. In a part of the world prone to corruption and poor governance, it also raises questions about who actually benefits from China’s projects. The answers, international development specialists say, are hidden from public view.

“We know more about China’s military expenditures than we do about its foreign aid,” said David Shambaugh, an author and China scholar at George Washington University. “Foreign aid really is a glaring contradiction to the broader trend of China’s adherence to international norms. It is so strikingly opaque it really makes one wonder what they are trying to hide.”

Until recently, wealthy nations could hardly hold themselves out as an example of how to run foreign aid, either. Many projects turned out to be tainted by corruption or geared to enrich the donor nation’s contractors, not the impoverished borrowers. But over the past 10 or 15 years, some 30 developed nations under the umbrella of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.) have made a concerted effort to clean up their assistance programs.

They demanded that foreign money be awarded and spent transparently, using competitive bidding and outlawing bribery. Increasingly, they also are also pushing to give borrowers more choice among suppliers and contractors, rather than insisting that funds be recycled back to the donor nation’s companies.

China, which is not a member of the O.E.C.D., is operating under rules that the West has largely abandoned. It mixes aid and business in secret government-to-government agreements. It requires that foreign aid contracts be awarded to Chinese contractors it picks through a closed-door bidding process in Beijing. Its attempts to prevent corrupt practices by its companies overseas appear weak.

Some developing nations insist on independently comparing prices before accepting China’s largesse. Others do not bother. “Very often they are getting something they wouldn’t be able to get without China’s financing,” said Chris Alden, a specialist on China-African relations with the London School of Economics and Political Science. “They presume that the Chinese are going to give value for money.”

Development experts say they have tried to convince the Chinese government that better safeguards and a more open process will enhance its efforts to gain influence and business. If its projects collapse because of kickbacks or inflated costs, they argue, China will end up exporting not only goods and services, but a reputation for corruption that it is already battling at home.

But Deborah Brautigam, the author of a coming book on China’s economic ties with Africa titled “The Dragon’s Gift,” says Beijing is hesitant to hobble its companies with Western-style restraints before they have become world-class competitors.

Thinking Business, Not Ethics

“The Chinese are kind of starting out where everyone else was years ago, and they see themselves as being at a disadvantage,” Ms. Brautigam said. “The Chinese don’t particularly want a big scandal. That doesn’t further their interests. They just want their companies to get business.”

Sometimes they get both. In 2007, the Philippines was forced to cancel a $460 million contract with the Beijing scanner company, Nuctech Company Ltd., to set up satellite-based classroom instruction after critics protested the company had no expertise in education.

It also canceled a $329 million contract awarded to ZTE Corporation, a state-controlled Chinese communications company, after allegations of enormous kickbacks. ZTE denied bribing anyone, but the controversy has lingered. Last month an antigraft panel recommended filing criminal charges against two Philippines officials in connection with the contract.

A Manila-based nonprofit group, the Center for International Law, has mounted a legal challenge against still another Chinese contract in the Philippines, to build a $500 million railroad. Professor Roque, who leads the center, contends that the price of China’s state-owned contractor “was simply plucked out of the sky.” Officially, China’s directive to its companies is toe an ethical line overseas.

“Our enterprises must conform to international rules when running business, must be open and transparent, should go through a bidding process for big projects and forbid inappropriate deals and reject corruption and kickbacks,” Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, told a group of Chinese businessmen in Zambia in 2006.

But China has no specific law against bribing foreign officials. And the government seems none too eager to investigate or punish companies it selects if they turn out to have engaged in shady practices overseas.

Indeed, it has an added incentive to look the other way because of the state’s ties to many foreign aid contractors — connections that sometimes extend to families of the Communist Party elite.

In January, for example, the World Bank barred four state-controlled Chinese companies from competing for its work after an investigation showed that they tried to rig bids for bank projects in the Philippines. But two of those companies remain on the Chinese Commerce Ministry’s list of approved foreign aid contractors, according to its Web site.

The Namibia controversy is especially delicate because until late last year, the contractor’s president was Mr. Hu’s son, Hu Haifeng. The younger Mr. Hu is now Communist Party secretary of an umbrella company that includes Nuctech and dozens of other companies. As soon as allegations against the company surfaced this summer, China’s censors swung into action, blocking all mention of the scandal in the Chinese news media and on the Internet.

“This is a signal to everyone to back off,” said Russell Leigh Moses, an analyst of Chinese politics in Beijing. “Everyone goes into default mode, because once you get the ball rolling, no one knows where it will stop. No one wants their rice bowl broken.”

Nuctech has denied any wrongdoing in court papers filed here in Windhoek. A spokeswoman said the company had no comment because the matter was unresolved. China’s Commerce Ministry and other government agencies did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Namibia’s anticorruption investigators allege that Nuctech funneled $4.2 million in kickbacks to a front company set up by a Namibian official, who split the funds with her business partner and Nuctech’s southern Africa representative, a Chinese citizen.

A Deal Ends in Arrests

China has promoted Nuctech as one of its global “champions.” In 10 years the company has gained customers in more than 60 countries, marketing advanced-technology scanners that help detect contraband or dangerous materials inside cargo containers. Nuctech’s spokesman says it is the only Chinese company that makes such equipment.

The Namibian government was interested in equipping its airports, seaports and border posts with scanners to comply with stricter regulations on international commerce. On a state visit to China in 2005, Hifikepunye Pohamba, Namibia’s president, visited Nuctech’s headquarters and factory, according to court testimony. The following year, Nuctech sent a representative, Yang Fan, to Windhoek, Namibia’s capital.

Hu Jintao’s visit to Windhoek a few months later opened up an option for finance. “China says the sky is the limit. Just say what you want,” said Carl Schlettwein, the permanent secretary of the Namibian Finance Ministry, who participated in the negotiations.

At first, Mr. Schlettwein said, the talks stalled because Namibia was unwilling to grant China access to its substantial mineral deposits in exchange for lines of credit. Once China dropped that condition, Namibia agreed in principle to a $100 million, 20-year-loan at a 2.5 percent interest rate, then well below the market. “Purely from a financial point of view, it was a fine deal,” Mr. Schlettwein said.

Namibian officials decided to draw on the credit line to finance most of the cost of the scanners. Mr. Schlettwein, who negotiated the scanner contract, said he wanted to seek competitive bids from scanner suppliers around the world, but Chinese negotiators refused.

“They said ‘that is not our system,’ “ he said. “ ‘We tell you from whom you buy the equipment.’ All of us, including the minister, were very worried about the nontransparent way of doing things,” he said, but reasoned that the Chinese government “will not unduly cheat us.”

Last March, less than a week after the Finance Ministry paid Nuctech an initial $12.8 million, Mr. Schlettwein’s unease turned to distress.

A Windhoek bank official, following the strictures of Namibia’s new money-laundering act, called to ask why Nuctech had deposited $4.2 million in the account of a consulting company set up by Tekla Lameck, a Namibian public service commissioner.

Mr. Schlettwein, who says that he has never met Ms. Lameck and that she had nothing to do with the scanner purchase, alerted Namibia’s anticorruption commission. In July, Ms. Lameck, her business partner and Nuctech’s representative in Windhoek were arrested on suspicion of violating Namibia’s anticorruption law. All three have denied wrongdoing.

Investigations Galore

Investigators charge that Nuctech agreed to hire Ms. Lameck’s consulting company, Teko Trading, in 2007, a month after President Hu’s visit. Nuctech agreed to pay Teko 10 percent of the contract if the average price of one scanner was $2.5 million. If the price was higher, Nuctech would pay Teko 50 percent of the added cost. A subsequent agreement fixed the amount of commissions at $12.8 million, according to court records.

At his bail hearing last month, Yang Fan, Nuctech’s representative, said his company hired Teko because “Teko explained how to do business here in Namibia.” He did not elaborate. But in 2007, another Namibian official complained to the anticorruption commission that Ms. Lameck had introduced herself to the Chinese Embassy in Windhoek as a representative of Swapo, Namibia’s governing political party. She claimed that no business could be done in Namibia without Swapo’s involvement, the complainant said.

Investigators have been seeking Nuctech’s explanation of the affair for more than two months. There is little sign the company has complied with their requests, although investigators say they remain hopeful.

Namibia’s chief national prosecutor, Martha Imalwa, traveled to Beijing in July, hoping to question officials from Nuctech and another company involved in a separate inquiry. But according to her deputy, Danie Small, Ms. Imalwa was allowed to present questions only to the international division of China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate.

A court has temporarily frozen $12.8 million in Nuctech’s assets while the inquiry continues. Meanwhile, at Namibia’s Finance Ministry, Mr. Schlettwein is belatedly trying to determine what other buyers paid for comparable scanners. When he asked South African officials for pricing information, he said, he was told Nuctech’s contract there is also under investigation.

Perhaps predictably, competitors say Namibia agreed to pay far too much. Peter Kant, a vice-president at Nuctech’s American rival, Rapiscan Systems, said that comparable equipment and services costs about $28 million, or $25 million less than Nuctech’s contract.

Mr. Schlettwein last month tried to send a letter through official channels to Rong Yonglin, Nuctech’s chairman, to ask that the contract be renegotiated. But a Chinese Embassy official in Windhoek refused to accept the correspondence, saying he knew no one with that name.

China Helps the Powerful in Namibia

November 20, 2009

Uneasy Engagement

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

BEIJING — Like parents everywhere, mothers and fathers in Namibia, an impoverished southern African nation, worry about college costs and opportunities for their children. The Chinese government has stepped forward to help — for a select and powerful few.

So far this year, the Beijing government has secretly awarded scholarships to study in China to the offspring of nine top officials, including to the daughter of Namibia’s president, Hifikepunye Pohamba. Two young relatives of Namibia’s former president and national patriarch, Sam Nujoma, also received grants.

The disclosure of the scholarships, first revealed by a feisty Namibian newspaper, has unleashed a wave of fury from the nation’s civil society groups and youth organizations. In a country where five in six high school graduates do not go on to college, many find it unconscionable for well-paid government leaders to accept overseas university scholarships for their children.

“Only senior people in government knew about the scholarships,” said Norman Tjombe, director of the nonprofit Legal Assistance Center. “No chance was given at all to the general public.”

The controversy has reignited a simmering debate in Namibia over deals with the Chinese government, already under scrutiny by Namibian prosecutors. Inquiries there and in other developing countries in Africa and Asia have cast a fresh light on how China sometimes uses its treasure chest of foreign loans and aid to create elite alliances and ease the approval of no-bid contracts.

Even some within Namibia’s governing Swapo party are asking whether China is trying to buy influence with their nation’s political leadership to gain access to mineral resources or to win business for its well-connected companies.

“How is it that this favor just comes like manna from heaven?” said Elijan Ngurare, secretary general of Swapo’s youth league, in a telephone interview. “Clearly there must be something that they are after.”

To some international relations experts, the scholarship controversy illustrates a blind spot in China’s aggressive strategy to cement diplomatic alliances, lock in natural resources and solicit trade and business on the African continent. In Namibia at least, Chinese government officials seem caught off guard by the public scrutiny exercised by a vibrant civil society.

The scholarship scandal was first revealed in Informante, a free tabloid in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, with a proud motto: “You conceal. We reveal.” It has no counterpart in China, where even the most aggressive media outlets stop short of raising unfavorable questions about the dealings of top officials or their children.

Bates Gill, director of the Stockholm International Peace Institute, said China was accustomed to opaque, controlled, government-to-government relations. “China’s engagement in Africa is moving further and faster than its ability to try and shape perceptions there,” he said. As a result, “there will inevitably be embarrassments.”

The list in Namibia is growing. In July, anticorruption investigators alleged that a state-controlled Chinese contractor had facilitated a $55.3 million deal to sell the Namibian government security scanners with millions of dollars in kickbacks. The inquiry is particularly delicate because until late last year, Hu Haifeng, the son of President Hu Jintao, ran the scanner company. A Chinese Commerce Ministry official recently said that China was cooperating with the Namibian authorities.

Another investigation centers on allegations that a Chinese weapons company funneled $700,000 to Lt. Gen. Martin Shalli, the commander of Namibia’s defense force. Namibia’s president suspended General Shalli from his post in July. General Shalli so far has declined comment.

Mr. Gill said such allegations threatened to undermine China’s impressive campaign to link its development with Africa’s. Over all, while China is making “an enormous and positive contribution to Africa’s development,” he said, it is still unaccustomed to the dynamics of some African democracies.

At the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation this month, the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, announced that China would double the amount of low-interest loans it offered Africa to $10 billion over the next three years, increase the number of scholarships and reduce tariffs on products from the poorest nations.

But he sounded frustrated when asked whether China was only after Africa’s natural resources.

“Why are there always accusations against China?” he said at a Nov. 8 news conference in Cairo. “Is this an African viewpoint or rather a Western viewpoint?”

In Namibia, political scientists say concerns are growing about whether officials are negotiating arm’s-length contracts with China. “People are thinking China is making secret deals with the government here and they are having all kinds of suspicions,” said Carola Engelbrecht, a citizen activist.

The scholarship recipients include children of some of Namibia’s most powerful officials, including the inspector general of the Namibian police and the justice minister, who is also the secretary general of Swapo.

One grant recipient is the son of the defense minister, whose agency buys weapons from China. Another is the son of the home affairs and immigration minister, whose agency is responsible for approving residence and work permits for an army of Chinese workers whose companies have won government or private contracts for business in Namibia.

Three other recipients are children of the minister, deputy minister, and a third high-ranking official at the Ministry of Mines and Energy. In July, the ministry renewed a license that gives a subsidiary of a state-owned Chinese company sole rights to search for uranium and other minerals in a prime prospecting area.

The nation’s anticorruption commission has begun a preliminary inquiry into how the scholarships were awarded. Chinese government officials have reacted in a familiar fashion: three government agencies in Beijing did not answer written questions.

Xia Lili, first secretary of the Chinese Embassy in Windhoek, said he had no obligation to respond to queries. “This is over,” he said.

But with national elections scheduled at the end of the month, it clearly is not. Bill Lindeke, a political scientist with the Institute for Public Policy Research in Windhoek, said Namibian officials might be forced to pay for their children’s educations in China to quiet the controversy.

Chinese Embassy officials initially insisted that the Education Ministry was in charge of the selection process. But Namibia’s education minister, Nangolo Mbumba, said at a news conference this month that his ministry handled only 10 scholarships to underprivileged students and had nothing to do with the other grants — some of which apparently cover five years of tuition.

He said the president’s daughter, Ndapanda Pohamba, who is now studying at the Beijing Cultural and Language University, “applied for the scholarship in her own right and only notified the parents afterwards.”

The minister’s statement that “you cannot bribe someone with a bursary” set off a fresh wave of indignation in a nation whose two universities can accommodate only about 2,000 of the 12,000 high school students who graduate each year.

“Mr. Mbumba: anything of value you accept, or even worse, solicit, constitutes a bribe if you hold public office,” one citizen said in a text message posted on the Web site of The Namibian, a Windhoek daily.

On the Mend - Tom McGuane

October 22, 2010

By MAILE MELOY

DRIVING ON THE RIM

By Thomas McGuane

306 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95

The narrator of Thomas McGuane’s new novel, “Driving on the Rim,” is a Montana doctor who was given the name Irving Berlin Pickett by his patriotic, evangelical mother, after the writer of “God Bless America.” Berl, as he’s known, describes himself as “irritable, hypercritical, obsessively orderly, claustrophobic, impatient, antisocial and agoraphobic, filled with objectless dread, pessimistic and fault-­finding.” All this might be true, but he’s also a good doctor, and he’s funny, sometimes with a sharp, sardonic wit and sometimes with a goofy self-deprecation. In the way of McGuane’s earlier American quasi ­heroes, he’s both competent and hapless, discovering, in his search for meaning, “that I was remarkably unformed for a man of my age and experience.”

The novel is a picaresque, circling back to Berl’s early life with unstable, itinerant parents and a lustful aunt. When his parents catch the 14-year-old Berl in bed with her, “the fact that they were guests in Aunt Silbie’s double-wide in no way prevented their attempting to chase her outside without her clothes. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a trailer has a gun, and Silbie pulled hers on Mom and Dad; just to make a clean sweep of it, she evicted all three of us.”

The boy needs a mentor, and finds one in a bird-hunting physician, Dr. Olsson, just when his parents have “entered a period they called Boozing for Christ.” Dr. Olsson’s life is ordered and disciplined where Berl’s is chaotic. He wears glasses except to shoot, and has a bird dog so reliable that “when she was pointing a covey he patiently removed his glasses, slipped them into his pocket, and then flushed the birds.” He takes the boy hunting and eventually sends him to college in Ohio. Berl becomes a doctor to please his mentor, and also, he admits, out of a desire to be rich.

Complications arise, as they often do for McGuane’s characters, in the form of a woman, or actually two women, or actually three or four. One is an archivist named Tessa Larionov, with “the look of a Tartar, wry and a little dangerous.” At 30, she has lured an elderly rare-prints dealer back to Montana, with a covetous and curatorial eye on his collection. The 20-year-old Berl falls in with Tessa after she accuses him of making obscene phone calls. “Oh?” he says to the police chief, in the equable (and ineffectual) way he will respond to later accusations of other crimes. “I don’t own a phone.” Their affair is brief, and while Berl makes his way through medical school and back home to practice, Tessa’s life disintegrates, and she winds up disinherited and homeless.

Meanwhile, a patient named Clarice, whom Berl met when she was an inventive young hitchhiker, has become resigned to beatings by her evil-minded husband. When the abuse finally leads to murder — “I told her nobody can live on Chicken McNuggets and popcorn,” her husband says by way of justification. “It’s not like she wasn’t warned” — Berl’s considered medical opinion is that the man should kill himself too, and for once his advice is taken.

Shortly after the murder-suicide, the once indomitable Tessa arrives in Berl’s emergency room, having stabbed herself with a bread knife. He tries to save her but can’t (he’s the only one who can tell us that, but I believe him). In a small town full of rivalries and rumors, suspicions mount that he killed Tessa, and because Berl feels guilty about Clarice’s husband’s death, he refuses, in a detached and fatalistic way, to defend himself. He pleads nolo contendere to the entire town.

But that’s only the beginning. Almost exactly halfway through the novel, a plane crashes, dropping an auburn-haired pilot named Jocelyn Boyce into Berl’s life. She gives him something not to feel detached about, but she’s a whirlwind of trouble. Berl’s quest to be shriven for his crimes, as if that will provide a comprehensible shape to his life, veers off into an extended, deluded search for Jocelyn.

As with McGuane’s earlier novels, the rambling plot is sustained because the individual episodes are a pleasure, often farcical and always acutely observed, and because the hero is sympathetic in his dissociated journey. (McGuane’s ­essays and short stories, on the other hand, are taut and controlled, and he expertly handles their cutting-horse turns.) In one of the funniest passages, Tessa and Berl take a tango lesson, with ­disastrous results. “Señor!” the Argentine master cries. “Grappling has no place in our national dance!”

Berl’s patients show up throughout with medical complaints, even after he’s expelled from his clinic, and his interest in their life stories belies his claims of self-absorption. He also has a best friend to stand by him: a lovely and opinionated pediatrician named Jinx Mayhall. She knows Berl is driven by guilt and desire, but thinks, according to his lawyer, that he’s “cuter than a speckled pup.” She likes his wit and despairs of his folly, and waits for him to come around. “You seem to have dropped a stitch right in the middle of your life and it is time for you to do something else,” she tells him. “Perhaps you find it difficult living in a morally bankrupt and hate-filled nation, and it’s not for me to say. But you go around like a cat ruining a blanket trying to find a place to lie down.”

McGuane’s characters are always keenly written, and that makes it bewildering when continuity falters and the illusion that they’re real people falls apart. Depending on which clues I used from the book, Berl Pickett was born no earlier than 1964, or in exactly 1960, or in the 1940s. I’ve thought about whether this could be intentional unreliability in the narrator, but I think it’s just a mistake that should have been caught in editing — and it’s one of many. Another character is both 65 and in his mid-30s at the same moment, and a third is both alive and dead.

In some ways, such continuity errors don’t matter; in other ways they really do. It matters whether Berl is in his 30s or his 60s when he’s chasing the wrong woman — not just to how we picture him physically, but to how we experience and enjoy and weigh him. It’s hard to know what to do with both possible ages, except to wish, presumptuously, for a time machine and a crack at the book in manuscript.

Still, there are riches here, especially sentence by crackling sentence, and ­McGuane is as good as ever on the redeeming aspects of a troubled country — on diving prairie falcons, the satisfactions of work, and people who tell absurd stories about themselves on their way to growing up. The hedonistic lawyer defending Berl against homicide charges tells him: “Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana. And you, my friend, are a blue-ribbon, bull-goose freak.” It’s my favorite line in the novel, and you can’t help rooting for Berl to figure things out. Because everyone drops a stitch now and then, and who’s to say that we all shouldn’t get such a pass?

Maile Meloy’s latest book is a story collection, “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.”

The Inconstant Gardener

By TOBIN HARSHAW

THE NETWORK

By Jason Elliot

337 pp. Bloomsbury. $24

Jason Elliot’s first novel may be the ideal thriller for the age of “C.S.I.” Forget Bondian femmes fatales and Bournian superassassins, and prepare to learn a great deal about steganographic code-making, the differences in the safety catches of various Soviet-era firearms and which side of a car to fling yourself out of should you come under roadside attack. It’s safe to say that “The Network” is the first spy thriller in which the climactic action scene is decided in large part on the basis of whose vehicle has superior gear differentials. And yet, it’s a lot of fun, this mix of spy chic and übergeek.

An unlikely candidate for the espionage genre, Elliot is known primarily for “An Unexpected Light,” a much-praised narrative of his travels in Afghanistan published a decade ago. And here he takes us back to that place and time — the innocent days when the words “Al Qaeda” and “Osama bin Laden” would have drawn blank stares at the water cooler. Elliot’s protagonist is Anthony Taverner, a former British Army officer whose intelligence career foundered when his personal life sent him “spinning in a different direction.” Now a divorced father and struggling landscaper, Anthony is brought back into the world of black ops through his connection to the titular Network, a loose coalition of figures in the British diplomatic, military and espionage services who are convinced that “the Western powers will no longer fight conventional wars because the enemy of the future will be more diffuse” and “grow out of the disaffected peoples of the Islamic world.”

Anthony’s entry into this elect stems from his youth. Back in the 1980s, when the Soviet military was getting its nose bloodied by the Afghan mujahedeen, he and another restless British college student spent a few months in the country living the lives of AK-47-toting jihadists — certainly a more edifying spring break than Daytona Beach, if not necessarily more dangerous. Soon after, they were recruited to the Network by an old family friend of Anthony’s, referred to only as the Baroness. With her affection for mnemonics and habit of dropping vaguely portentous pearls of wisdom, she’s Kipling’s Colonel Creighton by way of Yoda.

Fast forward to 2000 or so, when Anthony is brought back into the great game for two parallel tasks: to destroy a cache of Stinger missiles hidden in a crumbling Afghan fortress and to find his college mate, who after a decade as a mole in a Qaeda terrorist outfit finally needs to come in from the cold. This means that Anthony must regain his fighting trim, so he reports to a kindly former commando (simply called H), who puts him through a series of physical, technological and mental tests that will disabuse any reader of the illusion that there’s a Jason Bourne hidden inside us all. It’s swell reading, but I wouldn’t want to try it at home.

Elliot is so good at describing the preparations that go into modern spycraft that when the real action begins — with Anthony heading off on short-term missions to Washington and Khartoum — you may be somewhat disappointed by the conventionality of the plotting and the cardboard nature of the new characters, particularly a C.I.A. cowgirl and a Sudanese beauty who seem to have been planted in this novel only as positioning for its sequel. But the balance is regained when Anthony finally stands in the shadows of the Hindu Kush amid the bombed-out desolation of Kabul.

“The Network” won’t give you any fantastic insights into Afghanistan’s dissolution or Al Qaeda’s broader goals, but it’s a smart thriller for our time. And, as a bonus, I’ll be fully prepared the next time I run into a Taliban checkpoint on the Long Island Expressway.

Paella

How to make Paella Paella is a one of the world's most famous rice dishes, and this version is a seafood extravaganza. Although traditionally paella is prepared in a paellera (a wide, shallow pan with looped handles) and cooked over an outdoor fire, it's easy to cook paella to authentic perfection in your own kitchen over the stovetop. The following paella recipe serves 4, and for best results cook in a 14 or 15-inch paellera. A large shallow frying pan makes an acceptable substitute. Chop the vegetables Finely chop 1 red onion, dice 1 red and 1 green pepper (capsicum), finely chop 4 cloves of garlic, and finely chop 2 tablespoons of fresh flat-leaf parsley. Puree the tomatoes Using a box grater, puree 2 ripe tomatoes (vine-ripened are best), discarding the skin. Alternatively you can use a cup of canned peeled tomatoes mashed with a fork. Prepare the seafood Peel and devein 16 large raw shrimp (prawns), cut 2 squid tubes into rings, and scrub and debeard 12 fresh mussels. Cover and refrigerate. Make the sofrito Sofrito is a Spanish tomato and onion sauce which is used as a flavor base for a variety of dishes, including paella. To make the sofrito, heat 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in the paella pan over a medium heat and cook the chopped red onion, 2 tablespoons of parsley and 3 of the chopped garlic cloves for 8 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the pureed tomatoes and 2 teaspoons of paprika (preferably Spanish smoked paprika) and cook until all the liquid from the tomatoes has evaporated and the sofrito has the consistency of jam. Transfer the sofrito to a small bowl and wipe clean the paella pan. Cook the mussels While the sofrito is cooking, place the mussels in a saucepan with half a cup of simmering water. Cover and steam on a low heat for 5 minutes. Remove mussels and set aside, discarding any that haven't opened. Cook the shrimp and squid Heat 1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil in the paella pan over a medium-high heat. Add the remaining clove of chopped garlic and the shrimp and cook for 1½ minutes, tossing continuously. Add the squid rings and cook for a further 1½ minutes. Remove the shrimp and squid from the paella pan and lightly season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Cover and set aside. Cook the diced red and green peppers Heat 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in the paella pan over a medium heat and cook the diced red and green peppers for 6 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the rice Add the sofrito back to the pan along with 1½ cups of Spanish Calasparra or Bomba rice (regular medium-grain rice makes a good substitute) and cook for a minute, stirring to coat the grains. Add hot stock, saffron, salt and pepper and cook without stirring Add 3 cups of heated fish or chicken stock, a pinch of saffron threads, 1½ teaspoons sea salt and ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper. Stir to combine, and bring to a rolling simmer. Cook for 10 minutes, uncovered without stirring. (To make sure the rice cooks evenly you will need to regularly move the paella pan around the heat source, or you can stradle the paella pan over two burners.) Lower the heat and continue cooking Lower the heat to a gentle simmer and cook for a further 15 minutes without stirring. After 15 minutes, turn the heat up to medium-high for a minute or so until you can smell the rice toasting at the bottom, then remove the paella pan from the heat. (The toasted rice bottom of a paella is called socorrat and is highly prized.) Add seafood and peas and cover Push the reserved shrimp, mussels and squid into the cooked rice, and scatter with half a cup of defrosted green peas. Cover the pan with foil or a clean cloth, and let the paella rest for 5 minutes. Serve with lemon wedges Present the paella in the pan at the table with lemon wedges on the side for drizzling.