A Few More Pieces for the Climate Crisis Show, and Winter Solitude Finished!

Disappearing Beauty - Langjokull, Central Highland, Iceland, 
Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 5"h x 7"w, 013 #49

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $30) 

One of the other litter pieces in the "Disappearing Beauty" series -- this one depicts another endangered glacier in the central highland of Iceland. During my visit to Iceland I drove across the roadless central highlands -- it was almost a moon landscape with sparse ground vegetation (only lichen and tundra grass, not a tree visible) and its various shades of ochers, siennas and browns due to the iron and sulfur compounds abundant in the volcanic rocks and soil. Most of the mountain encountered on this journey are half-covered with glacier, and when temperature rise during the day, fog start to hover at the base of them, intermingle with wind-carried dust (due to the lack of vegetation), veiling the foothills in such a surreal way. Not another soul to be found in my entire journey -- no people, no animal, no sound of critters. The only thing one hears is the roaring of ever-blowing wind. I feel I was almost transported to an entirely different eon of time. The whole experience was so surreal...

Later I learned that the glacier I saw during this road trip, Langjokull, was one of the small ones in Iceland and was much threatened by the gradual warming of the surrounding sea of Iceland, and its area acreage has shrunk quite considerably in recent year already, because of the fast summer melting in higher average day temperatures, and mild winter without much snow replenish it. It would break my heart to see such unique landscape losing its essential components due to the lack of action on our side -- it takes millennium to make a glacier, but they could be gone in decades in the current trend, and never to be experienced again by future generations...

Disappearing Beauty - Palisade Glacier Lake, Sierra Crest, Summer,
Watercolor on Sennelier #140 Rough Paper, 4"h x 9"w, 2013 #48

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $35) 

The third one in the "Palisade Glacier Lake" set -- this one depicts the scene of lush summer. All three are matted together in a triptych format with 16" x 20" frames right now, in the "Climate Crisis" show of the Main Gallery of Redwood City. This exhibition is now open and runs through Sunday, June 30th. The Main Gallery, located at 1018 Main Street in Redwood City, is open every Wednesday through Sunday from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm. If you are in the area, remember to stop by and see all the interesting art pieces in the show!

Winter Solitude, Watercolor on Arches #140 Rough paper, 7"h x 10"w, 2013 #50

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $40) 

Finally, I completed "Winter Solitude" by adding foreground calligraphy of little shrub and withered grass, and like the mood -- I may try to paint a larger version of it, on a different type of paper... Recently I am really itching to paint larger and use my 2" and 3" sky flow brushes... I enjoyed exploring the different stage of drying and the textural effects one can achieve by continuing adding dense pigment on a gradually drying surface, which you can see on the foreground tree bark and shrub -- some part of its main stem has a fuzzy look which is accidentally achieve when a rigger brush loaded with stiff mixture of brown and blue is pressed hard on surfaces with different level of wetness, and in the wetter areas the pigment would diffuse just enough to create the fuzzy look. I thought it added surface interest and decided to keep it, and maybe explore this effect later more deliberately in future paintings... One of the "happy accidents" so famous for the media of watercolor, isn't it? ;-)

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Visual Poetry, and Thoughts on Landscape Painting

Winter Solitude, Watercolor on Arches #140 Rough paper, 7"h x 10"w, WIP 1

When I started to learn watercolor painting, I would be really puzzle by the idea that somebody could and would prefer to paint from a pencil sketch -- black and white, maybe with some notes jotted down on it. I would always wonder how they could proceed to paint a large full sheet landscape from a small 4" x 6" thumbnail value sketch -- how do they know what color the field it, and what detail do they put on that tree, how do they manage to paint it without a reference photo?... 

As I progress as a painter, I have gradually come to the realization that painting -- especially painting of landscapes -- is more about accumulating your collected pool of visual symbols and editing the shape in the image you are creating on paper, about tuning your visual language into a coherence poem. Even with a detailed photo snatched on spot a good landscape painting would more than likely to divert from it, and inventing his own shapes for a foreground bush, or tuning the sky color to create a certain mood. A good still life painting can be 80% similar in its color and shapes to the original reference photo (or setup), but in landscape it is very likely one would need to do 50% or more editing on shapes and colors to reach a pleasing picture on paper. It is more close to poetry than prose in this sense, if compared to literal arts.

This is probably why it is such a hard transition for competent still life painters to transition to landscape painting, and vise versa, because it in a way emphasizes a completely different arsenal of skills, although the basic elements -- shapes, color, value -- are the same for the two genre. Just like poetry and prose both uses words and sentences, though, it doesn't mean good poets would write compelling short stories, or reverse.

I feel I am relearning my visual language in painting more landscapes in the past couple of weeks, and would love to pursue this direction more. It is both exciting and terrifying, as all learning experiences are -- I am in uncharted waters here, and feeling again helpless more than competent most of the times. But it is also exhilarating. The journey has begun...

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

More Paintings for "Climate Crisis: An Artistic Vision" Show

Disappearing Beauty - Vatnajokull Glacier Lake, Iceland, 
Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 5"h x 7"w, 2013 #45

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $30) 

Continuing my "Disappearing Beauty" series for the Climate Crisis Show in the Main Gallery -- it opens this Wednesday! The artists' reception is this Saturday, June 1st from 6 to 8 pm. If you are in the Redwood City area, stop by 1018 Main Street (right beside Alana's Cafe) and say Hi!

This one is based on my travel a couple of years ago to Iceland -- a country with 25% of land covered by glaciers of various sizes, all in the process of disappearing if the global climate keeps its warming trend. Vatnajokull is in the southeast side of Iceland and its tongue is directly melting into a large lake, with icebergs broken off the glacier tongue floating on the lake surface, it's quite a surreal scene of intense purples and turquoises -- colors that are even considered too bright-hued when used on canvas actually appearing in nature. With the glacier melting faster than ever, in less than a couple of decades lakes like this may totally cease to exist...

Disappearing Beauty - Palisade Glacier Lake, Sierra Crest, Fall,
Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 4"h x 9"w, 2013 #46

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $35) 

I've enjoyed doing the long-format little piece of palisade glacier lake so much that I decide to make it a triptych. The last one is a winter view and this one is approximately fall, with the high peaks surrounding the lake starting to be covered by snow, but the lower foothills still have some brown colors of brushes and prairie grass. The lake is not yet frozen, reflecting the clear autumn sky color of the high country... With a warmer planet and much less winter snow fall, such high country glacier lakes may totally disappear due to the lack of replenish water source from melting snow in the next couple of decades, just like the lakes that used to cover the vast region of death valley a hundred thousand years ago...

I've used a very limited palette of three colors to do this piece and thoroughly enjoyed it -- with such limitations imposed, I actually feel that I can spend more time concentrating on solving the relative color temperature and value problem without being distracted by the decisions of whether it is the right hue that I am mixing for a particular object in the landscape. Also, it is much easier to abstract landscape into various shapes instead of considering it as a compilation of different objects when the colors are not an accurate imitation of nature.

Disappearing Beauty - Sunset over Rockies, June, 
Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 5"h x 7"w, 2013 #47

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $30) 

The next one, "Disappearing Beauty -- Sunset over Rockies, June" is based on my trip up in Colorado a couple of years ago. It was June but snow is still everywhere once you get into the mountains. And as the sun sets against western sky, all the snow covered peaks in the high Rockies just turned into this flaming red, which gradually faded into a deep purplish blue near the base of the peaks. It was a glorious show every evening, and never exactly the same. With an average six degrees' average temperature increase as predicted in the next few decades, there would hardly be any snow left on these peaks in the month of June, when the vegetation on the plateau is lush, and such glorious show in nature's beauty would be missed by the future generations...

More to come -- stay tuned!

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Gallery Show ("Climate Crisis: An Artistic Vision"), and a New Painting ("After the Summer Rain")

After the Summer Rain, 
Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 5"h x 5"w, 2013 #42

Sold!

The busy season of Silicon Valley Open Studio is finally over! Thanks too all the art enthusiasts and collectors in this area, it was quite an unexpected success for me the very first time I participated! With every painting sold stories exchanged between the artist and the collector, and I have learned a ton about what attract people to buy a painting...

My next big project is the gallery show with the theme of Climate Crisis in the Main Gallery of Redwood City. It is quite a mighty subject to tackle and my take on it is a series of small landscapes of both mountain and oceanic glaciers under the title "Disappearing Beauty". The one below is a little 5" x 7" painting of the snowy peaks of high Sierra (Sierra Crest near Mono Lake) belong to the series. With gradually warming weather most of these pristine snow packs would disappear in the next few decades in summer...

Disappearing Beauty - Snow Packs of Sierra Crest, 
Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 5"h x 7"w, 2013 #43

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $30) 

The next one in the "Disappearing Beauty" series is a little long-format landscape of the icy glacier lake of Sierra Crest, near North Palisade... High mountain glaciers are the most threatened by the warming climate, as there are not enough snow in recent winters to replenish what melts away each summer. The pristine lakes of high sierras may become dry lake beds if the current trend continues...

Disappearing Beauty - Palisade Glacier Lake, Sierra Crest, Winter,
Watercolor on Sennelier #140 Rough Paper, 4"h x 9"w, 2013 #44

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $35) 

I really enjoyed doing these little landscapes but also itch to start a slightly bigger one... More to come, stay tuned!...

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Celebration (Finished!), and Silicon Valley Open Studio Events!

Celebration,  Watercolor on Arches Cold Press Board, 6.5"h x 10"w, 2013 #41

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $75) 

or, Buy It Now from My Website ($135)

Silicon Valley Open Studio is here! From this weekend on there would be Free Self-Guided Art Studio Tours all through the South Bay area, from Los Gato all the way up to Burlingame. If you are in Palo Alto any of the next three weekends (including this one), come by Great American Framing Company & Gallery at 229 Hamilton Ave. to say hi! I will be there showing my watercolors with 5 other talented painters, mosaic artists and jewelers, including one that cast natural leaves and flower petals into silver jewels! The schedules for each weekend is:

Saturday, May 4, 2013 from 10am to 4pm and

Sunday, May 5, 2013 from 11am to 4pm

Daily art demonstrations will take place throughout the weekend. You can view the complete schedule of days, times and subject matter in the brochure or on the website. Or you can pickup a directory with map at any open studio site, including ours! If you happen to see a big "Silicon Valley Open Studios" yellow poster when strolling down the streets of any bay area cities this weekend, feel free to follow the arrow signs and enjoy a free are show!

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Jungle Fire (Finished!)

Jungle Fire,  Watercolor on Arches 140# Cold Press Paper, 8"h x 10"w, 2013 #40

Sold!

Just a very quick update on this piece which I have dragged along for almost a year, and finally finished during this weekend. No, I have actually not procrastinated on it -- some pieces come easier than the others, but this is not one of them. I would layer another wash on it every now and then, and look at it after a couple of days, feeling it still needed something -- slight adjustment of color temperatures, a little detail to modify the jagged edges left by masking fluid, etc. And finally, when I am looking at it today, I realized IT IS DONE. 

When I first started painting I never thought finish a piece is this much work and involves this much pondering -- I would select a good reference photo and when the painting looks quite like the photo I know it is done. But the more I paint, the more I realize it is the artist's aesthetics instead of the snap of a camera should dictate when and how a particular painting is finished. It can be as sketch or realistically detailed as you, the artist, is happy for it to be. The line between a finished painting and one not quite yet suddenly becomes much more blurred.

Sometimes I only realized a painting has passed its finishing point after I have put a couple more strokes and realized I just overworked it. ("An artist knows an awful lot -- but he only knows it afterwards", says the all-wise Paul Klee.) Sometimes I think it is done and frame the painting, only to take it out later for further adjustments. There is not an iron-cast standard, but more of a feeling that different layers and strokes are finally coming together into a beautiful, coherent whole, a melody instead of a collection of music notes.

Hopefully, as I continue working, one day the blurred line would become clear again...

How do you, my artist friends, decide that a painting you have labored over is done?

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

When in Doubt, Take a Workshop... (Really?!...)

Recently I had the chance to take a workshop with master artist Barbara Nechis, whose work I greatly admire, and whose style could not be more different from that of my own. The long commute daily across the wine countries of California provided scene upon scene of beautiful rolling great hills of pasture land and foggy estuaries, decorated with old, gnarly valley oak tress with personality of their own; it also gave me some quiet reflection time for the directions of my own artistic growth -- first and foremost, why do I take workshops, and what do I expect to accomplish in them?

Barbara Nechis Workshop Day 1, 

Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 11"h x 15"w, WIP 1

As beginner artists we all take workshops in one form or another, -- physically in the classroom with a master artist, or watch a dvd/video tutorials. We all yearn to learn. I used to be a workshop junkie and take a dozen each year, yet never reserve time in between to really digest, practice and incorporate what I have learned in each workshop. Sometimes I would not even have time to paint in between workshops, and as a result my improvement is sporadic to say the best. I would jump from trying to imitate one style I learned from artist A to another I saw in another workshop conducted by artist B, and the only thing I have picked up in this haphazard process is a variety of pallets filled with different brand watercolors, and some specialty, name-brand brushes of all odd shapes that I never use again after the workshop. (Sound familiar?... I guess this is the growing pains for beginning artists...)

Barbara Nechis Workshop Day 2, 

Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 11"h x 15"w, WIP 1

As I paint more regularly after leaving my day job, and most importantly, after I started attending the classical drawing and painting atelier last year, I gradually come to the realization that one's growth as an artist is not dependent on how many workshops one manage to attend, but on how much one tries to practice the important things learned in such experiences. Every minute spent in a workshop under the tutorage of a master artist must be accompanied by fifty, or a hundred times of working-alone-in-your-studio hours thinking, digesting, and practicing the things learned, otherwise the time in workshop are more than likely to be totally wasted. Long hours spent in one's studio working out the problems exposed under the guidance of a teacher, comparing your own work with the example of the master, reflecting on what is successful and what leaves more to be desired is a must for any taught material to be absorbed as one's own...

Barbara Nechis Workshop Day 3, 

Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 11"h x 15"w, WIP 1

The motivation to take a workshop could be many different ones, but largely they can be summarized into three different categories: to study the specific technique an artist use for his or her work, that you would like to utilize -- how to do the wet-in-wet blending? How to paint negatively around shapes? How to achieve rough texture on the barn? In Barbara's workshop I have learned how to paint shapes with clear water then drop in liquid color to create extraordinarily fluid shapes that has a life of their own, as well as paint from one section to another to assemble the painting, or paint with very stiff paints on soaking wet paper to achieve soft but more definite shapes that suggest flowers and foliage. I learned how to rewet the entire painting without disturbing pigments already on the surface, as well as glazing over thick pigments with big brushes. These are techniques I will be practicing in the coming days. Then there are concerns of interpretation of reference materials, and the question of how the master artist sees the same reference in their minds' eye differently from us, how they would translate a mundane photo or object into a poetic interpretation. What they would add to the picture, and what they would leave out, or take liberty to alter, and why they make those decisions. In the case of Barbara, she so often would just absorb the various color and shapes of the photos or other people's artwork that she finds inspirational, and then paint her own work with such influence in mind but without literal reference at all. Last and most difficultly, one could learn from a master about the design of one's work -- what are the utter most concerns regarding making a picture? How does a master artist go about tackle the problems of shape, value, color and what do they emphasize at each stage of the painting's development? Often in a successful workshop one would realize there is a definite reason for each artistic decision to be made -- the reason a curving petal is inserted here is to create a please curvlinear shape to echo another shape put down previously, and a leaflet is painted behind it not because it is accompanying the flower in the reference photo, but because a dark shape is needed to create the sense of luminosity of the light petal just painted... One decision leads to another and the painting energies from white paper based on such decisions -- the biggest mystery is hidden behind them. A good teacher does not only explain the "how"s of doing it but also the "why"s, and it is from these "why"s that we can learn how to not just paint things, but to compose a painting.

Sunkissed, Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico #140 Cold Press Paper, 5"h x 7"w, WIP 1

I've absorbed as much as I could like a sponge in the three-day workshop and realized that I probably need to return next year to gain a better understanding of some of the design concepts taught in the class -- one can only absorb as much as one's currently level allows. I never thought myself to be an abstract painter, but after this workshop, I am starting to realize that all paintings are essentially abstract paintings, and what makes a realistic painting successful in the end, is not the painter's skill to copy the blue water or pink petals as vividly and intricately as they appear in nature, but in his/her ability to assemble the abstract shapes of color and value into a pleasant design. Applying such principles in my own project, I have noticed that I became much more liberal with the usage of color, getting more concerned with how the interaction of various colors on the paper and less with how accurately they reflect the color in the reference photo. I am also getting more comfortable painting wet on dry, knowing difference shapes put down can be modified by the shapes put next to them and glazed on top of them, thus if they are not immediately successful, it is not an absolute disaster...

It will take many months for me to finally evaluate whether I have gained as much as I should from this workshop, but for now, I will say, it is an great inspirational experience that has brought much needed sense of jubilation into my art life... 

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Fields of Gold (Private Commission)

Fields of Gold, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 8"h x 8"w, 2013 #36

(Private Commission)

I realized the lacking of updates on this blog for the past few weeks -- no, I have not been slacking off; rather opposite, I was very busy trying to catch up with deadlines of all sorts -- a set of paintings as gifts to friends for their birthdays, and some private commission pieces, as well as preparing for some local spring themes shows. I had quite a few exciting news from juried show circles as well as in the sales department, which I will share with you in the next few days' posts. It's rather late now and I just finished this commissioned piece of yellow tulip, which is for a very sweet guy who commissioned it for his wife -- as a gift for their wedding anniversaries! Isn't that something? She is dutch so tulip is a must -- and I tried my best to convey the sense of a sea of golden tulips with only one clearly painted in the center stage, the rest just hinted through various blurred shapes. I must say doing glazings of yellow is hard -- they lift so easily and you can't really paint them thickly on, for they will appear chalky and dead-looking! But I had fun combining the flower in one reference photo with leaves in another, and background from yet another different photo! and painting the leaves gradually from in focus to out of focus and blurred across the page is a lot of fun too...

You can purchase my 2013 wall and desk calendars here:

Island Beauty - White Plumeria - Framed - Available at $125

Island Beauty - White Plumeria 

Watercolor on Fabriano #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w Framed to 10" x 10", Front View

Sold!

Island Beauty - White Plumeria 

Watercolor on Fabriano #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w Framed to 10" x 10", Back View

Back in December I entered two paintings in the Randy Higbee Gallery's 6" Squared Show and I have just received this one back in the mail today -- I have to say that I am very very impressed with how beautiful they framed and presented the painting. It is framed with their signature Catalina Black Wood Frame with Gold Lips, which beautifully showcases the golden center of this white plumeria flower. I am offering it for sale with the fame at a lower price of $125 for anyone interested, so that it will find a permanent loving home...

Here's the image of the painting without frame:

Island Beauty - White Plumeria 

Watercolor on Fabriano #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2012 #12

Sold!

You can purchase my 2013 wall and desk calendars here:

Fire Bird Completed!

Fire Bird, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 5"h x 7"w, 2013 #35

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $50)

After taking the good advice I got on facebook regarding this one, I gathered my courage and put in a near black mixture of French Ultramarine and Hematite to darken the background value, and put in the shadow shapes on the leaf behind the flower in approximately the same value. Now the yellow of the flower is really popping out! Thank you all who gave the much needed feedback, my artists friends!....

Jungle Fire, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 8"h x 10"w, WIP 7

After a couple more glazes I have now taken the masking fluid off this one -- as usual the resulted white shapes appear to be quite harsh. Now for the finishing touches the challenge is to tone down and refine the edge of these masked shapes using thin glazes which does not disturb the thick, saturated pigments which are already on the paper... I started with the petal on the right most side, using squirrel quill brush to gently lay in a warm yellow glaze on the right side of the petal, then changing to a No. 2 Kolinsky Sable brush to put in all the thin red lines suggesting the reflective pattern on this very shiny petal with a very stiff mixture of pigments. The previous washes for most part stayed unmoved -- which is great. Now I just need to repeat it for the left side petals... Fingers crossed!

You can purchase my 2013 wall and desk calendars here: