A Woman Finds Her Life Transformed by That ‘Whole World Out There’

Artist Tina Mion has a theory about travel and life. “It’s the monkey wrench effect,” she says. “When your life is getting stale, you have to throw something in.”

Travel is Tina’s monkey wrench. Over the years, she has reinvented herself at least three times by abandoning fixtures like home and job to embark on long, remarkable trips. For Tina, stability isn’t necessarily a virtue, and as a painter she needs to see new things.

I met her last month in Winslow, Ariz., where she and her husband, Allan Affeldt, are renovating a historic hotel called La Posada. Until 1997 they lived in Orange County, where Allan worked as a fund-raiser for world hunger and peace projects and Tina painted. In 1996 Tina had a show, called “Virtual Election,” at the Sherry Frumkin Gallery in Santa Monica. Inspired by the images of U.S. presidents on a deck of Smithsonian Institution playing cards, it included wry, idiosyncratic portraits of 42 presidents holding different cards and a self-portrait of the artist as the joker in the pack. She’s now at work on a complementary show called “Ladies First,” depicting the presidents’ wives, many of whom grace the walls at La Posada.

Tina, who has long blond hair, green eyes and a wonderfully unjaded air, is an inveterate traveler. She doesn’t take trips; she goes on life journeys. When I got home, I called her to talk more about them. Sri Lanka was her first major trip. She went with a one-way ticket when she was 21. She had dropped out of art school and was trying to make it in New York City, but, she says, her spirit was dying. “Besides, I learned more traveling than I would have if I’d stayed in school,” she says. “And life in Sri Lanka was cheap. At one point, I lived for a month there for $15.”

Question: Why Sri Lanka?

Answer: It was a steppingstone to India. I’d always wanted to go there. But I stayed in Sri Lanka until my visa ran out. Traveling as a young person is really important because the whole world falls out from underneath your feet. Everything you know and have been taught ceases to be real. I remember when I first got there, I saw men chewing betel nuts, with red juice dribbling from their lips. I thought, “My God, these people are cannibals!” Two months later I’d made friends in a village in the hill country and set up a studio.

Q. You went to India from there?

A. I had to because of the visa. But just before I got on the ferry, my ticket was stolen. So I waited until someone else was getting on with big boxes, then sort of made myself invisible and sneaked on. When I got to India, the immigration agent said my passport was illegal because I’d stayed too long in Sri Lanka. So I told him, “The man said it was OK.” And he let me through. Can you believe it?

Q. A traveler’s little white lie. I know them well.

A. I became an incredible liar in Sri Lanka, especially when men bothered me.

Q. I always say I’m married.

A. But then they want to see your ring. I learned how to say “I don’t like you. Go away.” They’re sexist, but they’re really terrified of strong women.

Q. How did you like India?

A. It changed me more than anyplace else. Everything that’s ugly and beautiful is side by side. I remember, when I first arrived, walking next to a man carrying a load of sticks on his back. A horse and cart came barreling down the street and ran over him. I saw the wheel go into his back. They put the body on the cart and drove away. I stood there in shock, watching people pick up his sticks.

I went there as a young woman, and I had a lot of anger in me. When I came back to the U.S., it was all gone. After seeing the kinds of things I’d seen, I couldn’t ever feel sorry for myself again.

Q. Your next trip was to Russia. How did that come about?

A. I was living in Washington, D.C., at the time and feeling stale. I went to Russia as part of the American Soviet Walk across the Ukraine. Allan organized it, but I didn’t know him then.

Q. Why did you choose the walk?

A. It was the height of the U.S. military buildup, and Reagan was president. I’m from a very conservative, anti-communist family and wanted to see for myself what the “evil empire” was like.

Q. You met lots of artists there, right?

A. Yes. Traveling with a sketchbook is a kind of bridge. Once I fell asleep on an empty bus, and when I woke up there was a Russian woman who was part of the walk sketching me. I told her I was an artist too. A Russian newspaper did a story that called us “paintbrushes for peace.”

Later some of the artists I met there came to visit me in Washington. They thought that all they had to do was pull out their paintings and everybody would buy them. They couldn’t understand that I had to support myself by working at other jobs.

Q. Next you moved to California. Why?

A. I saved up enough money to live someplace new for a year and just paint. California, New York, Yugoslavia, Reykjavik [Iceland] and Africa were on my list. But on July 4 I bought a ticket to L.A. and lived in Allan’s place while he was working on a peace walk in Vietnam.

Q. Did marriage tie you down?

A. I went to Kenya for six weeks. I gave Allan the chance to go, but he said no, and in a way I wanted to go alone. When you travel alone as a woman, you don’t have to think about your other life.

When I got home, he met me at LAX and told me he’d bought La Posada. We left the next morning.

I went to Europe as a teenager. When I got back, I told my friends, “My God, please believe me. The boys and the tests mean nothing. There’s a whole world out there.” I guess I realized very young that when you travel you can be who you want to be. You can change your life and start all over again.