Tran Nguyen

Tran Nguyen paints Atlanta after dark: women who cradle ringed planets, foxes tall enough to walk beside. The pictures look careful and a little far away. They come from a dirt-floored, one-room home in Can Tho, Vietnam, a cantaloupe offered by a flight attendant on the way to the United States, and a house in Hephzibah, Georgia, where her father cooked, her mother kept the home, and three brothers filled the noise.

The first American memories are small: a floor that was not dirt, a kitchen that smelled of her father’s work, a house that had to hold five children and two jobs. She found quieter rooms on screen. Neon Genesis Evangelion and the films of Hayao Miyazaki were the first private weather. A small painting kit from her parents started the copies. Scenes from those stories went onto paper because that was the job she had already chosen. “I didn’t really have a backup plan,” she says. “I just knew that’s what I wanted to do.”

Savannah College of Art and Design made illustration the job: one image, a lot of care, a narrative that has to live in a single frame. Freshman year, her younger brother Dinh was killed in a car accident. She says the loss forced her to grow up quickly. The pictures still carry that speed. The melancholy people name in the work is also family grief and mental illness, filtered through the writings of art therapist Bruce L. Moon. Difficult feeling became a visual language instead of a subject she had to explain. “I want to convey images that capture those obscure emotions,” she explains. “It’s a work in progress for me as well.” That phrase is hers, about the feeling, not a label on a page.

Graduation in 2009 meant a hard market: graphic design by day and freelance illustration at night. Full-time illustration arrived in 2013, with Random House, Netflix, and the World Wildlife Fund among the clients. The gallery side includes the retrospective book Ambedo and a solo show at Thinkspace in Los Angeles. Alison Impey, a senior art director at Random House Children’s Books, has called the work “beautiful and feminine, yet incredibly strong and powerful.” Fran Toves, founder of Common Cider, hired her unsure she could paint joy. The Blood Orange Tangerine sketches changed the bet. “We’ve been keeping Tran on the joyride ever since,” Toves says.

She is a night owl. The Atlanta studio stays late. Audiobooks run while titles arrive as poems. Hours of sitting come first; the composition follows. A recent picture has “star collectors” gliding in a canoe, a birdcage of planets and stars in someone’s arms. Look closer and the small objects start to behave like treasures. The familiar tilts. That tilt is the point.

Murals took her out of the quiet studio: monsoon streets in Hua Quan Village, China, and sun on the walls of Kaka‘ako, Hawai‘i. Strangers stop. “For them, it’s magic,” she says. “That raw response is really nice to get.” The large wall is a different temperature from the night desk. Both still ask the same care.

Displacement is the first room: dirt floor in Can Tho, a flight with cantaloupe, then Hephzibah. Her parents worked to make the second life hold. Three brothers made the noise that sent her toward anime and a kit of paints. Copying Evangelion and Miyazaki was the first private studio.

SCAD asked for care in a single image. Then Dinh died in a car accident in freshman year, and the care had to include grief she had not budgeted for. Bruce L. Moon’s writing gave her a way to put obscure emotion on the page without a case note. The melancholy is the family fact, held at a distance so other people can stand in it.

2009 meant two jobs. 2013 ended the split. Random House, Netflix, and the World Wildlife Fund are the names she can list without inflating it. Ambedo is the retrospective; Thinkspace in Los Angeles put the night pictures on a gallery wall. Impey’s sentence is a client’s sentence. Toves needed joy for Common Cider and found it in the Blood Orange Tangerine sketches. The joyride line is his.

Night is still the working hour. Audiobooks in the headphones, a title that sounds like a poem, then the canoe with the star collectors. Hua Quan in the monsoon and Kaka‘ako in the sun taught her what a stranger’s stop looks like. Vietnam remains the wall she has not painted yet.

If she could paint anywhere, she would choose Vietnam. “Even though I’ve been here for so long, all of my family is over there,” she says. “It would just feel really nice going back home.” Start with the fox. Then notice the planet is being held as if it might spill.