Featured Painting – Emergence

At first glance, Emergence is a calm sliver of routine life due to the simplicity of its composition and color scheme; upon closer inspection, what emerged from this picture was not so simple, rather it revealed something indecipherable and with a hint of sinisterness: against a sparse backdrop, a few curious looking, semi-translucent figures floated like ghosts from behind thin vertical bars, which made the whole landscape reminisce of a jail cell, despite the openness of those bars. What was emerging? Inner strength? Outside menace? Guilty conscience? Or stoical indifference to anyone’s fate?

 
Emergence
22” x 28”
Oil on Canvas
Completed in 2019


Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com 

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- Featured Painting, Whirring
- Featured Painting - Quarry
- Featured Painting – Desolate Souls of Main Street
- Featured Painting - Weave
- Featured Painting - Dream Forest
- Featured Painting - Interlocked
- Featured Painting - July Meteors
  

Featured Painting - Our Winter of Discontent

Immediately after the devastating 2016 US presidential election, I was in the grip of a stark vision, in which innocent and powerless people were rounded up by an oppressive strongman regime. That was the inception of my new project, “Our Winter of Discontent”, to evoke an assembly of miserable, discontent, and angry people, behind a sprawling web of barbed wire and menaced by dark clouds from above. This vision was not paranoid fiction; it was based on observation of Donald Trump’s increasingly divisive and hateful rhetoric, which led to his capture of the presidency, and reaffirmed the ugly political and cultural reality of an almost apocalyptic US.

The world at large had been threatened in recent years by rising totalitarian and nationalistic trends, and the diminishing of liberal democracy. The situation worsened every day as I painted, under the weight of Trump’s daily assault on democracy, free press, the rule of law, etc. My warning vision became a sad prophecy, as many asylum seekers and their young children were brutally separated, and summarily detained. It seemed -- and seems now -- that things could only get worse, that those behind the barbed wire fences could well include U.S. citizens and legal immigrants, not only those deemed “illegal.”

A good vision doesn’t necessarily lead to good painting. After many months’ struggle, I put aside my first attempt, which had become somewhat too belabored, and a bit unyielding, and started over with version two. Yet, though satisfying to a certain degree, it became a bit regimented, less spontaneous, and also a bit removed from my vision of a manic world of disorder.

Having learned my lessons from those two attempts, I started a third version, and it achieved what I set out to document, with an unsettling and fluid visual style that matches our disturbing and depressing zeitgeist.

Here, the final product, “Our Winter of Discontent”.

The painting was completed before the world was assaulted by the novel Coronavirus, which most brutally affected countries whose leaders are waging wars against science, and suppressing truth and the free press. The painting was created before the tsunami of “Black Lives Matter” protests took hold in the US. But it evokes, or perhaps portends, the suffering and struggle that rolls on ceaselessly through human history.

These are the emotions and historical trends that my painting “Our Winter of Discontent” is trying to capture and reflect.


Our Winter of Discontent
Oil on Canvas 22” x 28”
Completed in 2018


Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com

Other Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
- Featured Painting -- Congregation
-Featured Drawing "Formation"
- Featured Painting "Birches"
- My Featured Painting - "Paris and Three Goddesses"
- My Featured Painting - Colony
- My Featured Painting - New Century's Shangri-La
- My Featured Painting - Procession
- Featured Painting - Waft

Featured Painting -- Congregation

A giant verdant tree, erect on its strong and knobbly roots, full of colorful chairs hanging from its riotously wide-spreading branches, is quite a heartwarming congregation. Warm and deep colors intertwined with shades cool and pale, helps to create modulating and shifting moods.

Despite joyous colors of those chairs, their positions are somewhat precarious, manifested in a lone chair underneath the seemingly carefree gathering, clinging to the roots of the tree — knocked down, a fallen one, or a cast out one? It would be up to viewers to interpret.

 Apropos viewer’s perception, I was also somewhat surprised to hear from a friend on how disturbing the painting was. Those swinging chairs, somewhat called more disturbing images to his mind — hanging bodies swinging in high branches, echoing those from war times documented by Goya, or from not so distant periods of concentrated lynching, whose records were fading fast from our collective memory. This linkage to the darkness was so serendipitous, that even I needed such illumination. Apparently, my intention, combining with viewers’ interpretation, could have generated much more interesting dialogue, thus create another form of congregation.

 

This painting currently is being exhibited at Berkeley Central Arts Passage, as part of the Unity show (June 16th - October 13th, 2018)


Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com

Other Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
- Featured Drawing "Formation"
- Featured Painting "Birches"
- My Featured Painting - "Paris and Three Goddesses"
- My Featured Painting - Colony
- My Featured Painting - New Century's Shangri-La
- My Featured Painting - Procession
- Featured Painting - Waft
- Featured Painting - Remembrance

Featured Painting – Anselm Kiefer’s Bathtubs

When artists strive to make things new, we can not and should not completely remove ourselves from the past or tradition. Often, the sediments of the past lend more meanings and poignancy to our new endeavors, or our new interpretations.

One of the greatest living artists Anselm Kiefer, is such an example who is steeped in tradition, and I was often moved by the historical resonances he brought forth to his monumental paintings, often through motifs connecting the past to the present, or the future. One of his striking paintings can be seen in SFMOMA, Unternehmen Seelöwe (Operation Sea Lion), placed a tin bathtub in a desolate field, containing several battleships. According to a curator, the manufacturer of those domestic bathtubs, was also manufacturer of weapons used in WWII by the Nazi armies. Such deft reference was a master stroke of Kiefer’s.



That painting, particularly its intriguing bathtub, left a strong impression on me, and it compelled me to record my understanding and imagination grew out of Kiefer’s motif, and led to a painting which I simply named as Anselm Kiefer’s Bathtubs, which was populated with several of such bathtubs in various planes and angles, as if floating on an open sea or in the space. Inside the central tub, a lonely-looking naked man hunched over and hugged his knees. The occupied bathtub, though surrounded by its “peers”, who were obviously in disagreement with one another, and rendered its lone occupier quite isolated and vulnerable.

Anselm Kiefer's Bathtubs
22” x 28”
Oil on Canvas
Completed in 2018
Such painting is also my tribute to a leading artist of our time.

Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com


Other Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
- My Featured Painting - "Paris and Three Goddesses"
- My Featured Painting - Colony
- My Featured Painting - New Century's Shangri-La
- My Featured Painting - Procession
- Featured Painting - Waft
- Featured Painting - Remembrance
- Featured Painting “Mirage” – A World of Ambiguity

My Featured Painting - Modern Man

My recent painting Modern Man is a portrait of a faceless man (or a woman) — dark, brooding, and quite uncertain — who symbolizes the anxiety-ridden man or woman of our uneasy and quite dangerous time, who's willingly or unwillingly blind, and can only stumble along in the deep fog from which he or she could never escape. The world is a trap.


Modern Man
20" x 16"
Oil on Canvas
Completed in 2018

Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com

Other Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
- My Featured Painting - "Paris and Three Goddesses"
- My Featured Painting - Colony
- My Featured Painting - New Century's Shangri-La
- My Featured Painting - Procession
- Featured Painting - Waft
- Featured Painting - Remembrance
- Featured Painting “Mirage” – A World of Ambiguity

My Featured Painting - Procession

My monochromatic painting Procession is a visually engaging and topically challenging work, which depicts a group of fantastic birds, treading despondently in a nondescript and barren landscape, carrying a dead companion in the middle of their solemn funeral procession. The overwhelming sadness was manifested in the starkly contrasted white and black color scheme, and the bend and stretched postures of those dejected birds, from gigantic to tiny. The loose brushstrokes and the lack of the last measure of definition, also contributed to the unreal and dreamy atmosphere.


Procession
Oil on Canvas
22" x 28"
Completed in 2017


Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com

Other Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
- Featured Painting - Waft
- Featured Painting - A Young Frenchman
- My Featured Painting "Cascades"
- My Featured Painting "Origin"
- Featured Painting - Remembrance
- My Featured Painting "Apprehend"
- Featured Painting “Mirage” – A World of Ambiguity
- Featured Painting – “Forest Within” – When Reality Met Illusion
- Featured Painting: The March of Time

My Featured Painting - Wafting

Despite some success of my 2015 painting Waft, which was recently published by Pomona Valley Review (Volume 11, Summer 2017), I clearly saw rooms for improvement, and recently I made a new version of the painting, titled Wafting — much darker and more dramatic, with additional whimsicality and humor, lent by the black flakes, resembling playful butterflies, darting above the little girl, who was, as in the 2015 version, running away from the viewer, holding strings tied to floating human balloons, all in the shape of young women dressed in pure white, against much darker and more ominous background, as if in the process of awakening or drowning. I believe that the latter effort was psychologically more penetrating and indeed a big improvement.

   
Wafting
Oil on Canvas
30" x 24"
Completed in 2017


Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com

Other Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
- Featured Painting - Waft
- Featured Painting - A Young Frenchman
- My Featured Painting "Cascades"
- My Featured Painting "Origin"
- Featured Painting - Remembrance
- My Featured Painting "Apprehend"
- Featured Painting “Mirage” – A World of Ambiguity
- Featured Painting – “Forest Within” – When Reality Met Illusion
- Featured Painting: The March of Time

Featured Painting - Waft

My 2015 painting Waft features, against an empty and nondescript landscape, a very small girl in the lower right corner of the vertical canvas, running away from the viewers, while holding strings tied to floating human balloons, all in the shape of young women dressed in pure white, in postures of awakening or drowning. Was it a hopeful dream, or a potentially nightmare? It is up to the viewers to decide. Perhaps, what I captured was the the hope and trepidation of a very young person at that cusp of growing into herself, while facing a future unknown.


Waft
Oil on Canvas
30" x 24"
Completed in 2015

This painting was chosen as cover art and as a featured piece on page 19 by Pomona Valley Review (Volume 11), published by California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in July 2017.




Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com

Other Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
- Featured Painting - A Young Frenchman
- My Featured Painting "Cascades"
- My Featured Painting "Origin"
- Featured Painting - Remembrance
- My Featured Painting "Apprehend"
- Featured Painting “Mirage” – A World of Ambiguity
- Featured Painting – “Forest Within” – When Reality Met Illusion
- Featured Painting: The March of Time

My Featured Painting "Arabesque"

The medium or media we choose to convey our deepest feelings and expressions, etc., however competent, can never fully convey the whole complicated concepts our brain formed mysteriously, thus the endless striving to meet the challenge, to do a better job still in the next given opportunity, thus the hunger to develop and grow as an artist, be it visual, musical compositional or a writing kind.

It also occurs often enough that one form of artistic creation, spurs on the re-interpretation with another media of either the whole story or a fleeting moment, not necessarily to prove a better job can be done; rather, to add another dimension to the engaging concept while hoping to complement the original.

I have been stimulated, on multiple occasions, by novels I read, sometimes the whole atmosphere of the book, such as Blindness by José Saramago, or sometimes, just a specific passage which may not even be pivotal in the whole scheme, such as my newly completed oil painting, Arabesque, inspired by a passage from The Known World by Edward P. Jones: "... looked over at the open chiffarobe [sic], whose door was broken and so would never close properly, looked at the black dress hanging there. It seemed to have its own life, so much life that it could have come down and walked over and placed itself over her body. Fastened itself."


Arabesque / 阿拉伯風 / Arabeske
Oil on Canvas
28" x 22"
Completed in 2013

I actually was quite stirred by the passage and the image just flooded into my mind. Incidentally, this painting also fell into a painting scheme of mine - I have been working on a series of "White Dresses", which I saw as both liberated and restricted, at once individual and impersonal, simultaneously beautiful and sinister. Now it started the companion series "Black Dress".






Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com

Other Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
- My Featured Painting "Cascades"
- My Featured Painting "Origin"
- Featured Painting - Remembrance
- My Featured Painting "Apprehend"
- Featured Painting “Mirage” – A World of Ambiguity
- Featured Painting – “Forest Within” – When Reality Met Illusion
- Featured Painting: The March of Time
- My Featured Painting "Minotaur" 

My Favorite Paintings in Palazzo Pubblico, Siena

During my week-long stay in the glorious Florence, Italy, in 2000, I made two day trips - Siena and Venice.  Siena, the arch-rival of Firenze, though could not compete with it for the incredible amount of art treasures, it did have its distinctive flavor and some substantial art collections.  My top two favorite artworks in this more medieval than Renaissance city were both in the Palazzo Pubblico, the former seat of Siena city government.  They were actually companion pieces - The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, a pair of large frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c. 1290 – 9 June 1348), much older than say High Renaissance artist Michelangelo (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564).

These allegorical paintings were full of fantastic imagination and blessedly free from the constraint of Renaissance perspective correctness, which was a giant leap forward for sure, also became a shackle in a lesser hands in the ensuring centuries.

I was most taken in by the delicacy yet vibrant of the colors and the expertly drawn figures, with such linear beauty resembling the more famed late comer Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445 – May 17, 1510).

An interesting point was that this is the only pairing of such contrast between good and evil, that the good is more interesting than the evil, markedly different from Goethe's Faust Part I and II, and the Dante's Paradiso.

Perhaps, the evilness of the bad government was too real and too familiar, while the good government was a true paradise, which was absolutely a fantasy.


 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, 1340

 
 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegory of Good Government, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, 1338-40


Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegory of Good Government (detail), Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, 1338-40


Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Bad Government and the Effects of Bad Government on the City Life (detail), fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena




Effects of Bad Government on the Countryside (detail), 1338-40, fresco in Palazzo Pubblico, Siena


My Favorite Museum Collection Series 

>> My Favorite Museum Collection Series 28: My Favorite Paintings at Galleria dell'Accademia, Venezia (Venice Academy)
<< My Favorite Museum Collection Series 26: My Favorite Art Works at Santa Maria Novella, Firenze

List of My Favorite Artworks in the Museums I've Visited

Cave Painting Is Finally Finished

On March 9, 2009, I posted six works-in-progress My Work In Progress.

Two of those six paintings were completed and posted on March 28th Two Newly Finished Paintings and one more on June 1st Two New Paintings.

Now, a fourth one is finished as well:

Now:

















and then:

Publications

William and Mary Review at Williamsburg, Virginia has just published my painting Upstream (30"x30", oil on canvas) and Branches (24"x18", oil on canvas) .
















Below are my previous publications in the William and Mary Review.

2008
Room with a Lamp
Oil on canvas
28" x 22"










2007
A Young Frenchman
Oil on canvas
24" x 20"










2006
A Young Frenchman (variation)
Oil on canvas
24" x 20"









2005
Drifting
Oil on canvas
30" x 40"











In 2007, Amistad online magazine at Howard University, Washington DC also published three paintings from my Apocalypse Series.

View online - Chose Art, then Matthew Felix Sun

Or view the PDF archiv <-- need to add this PDF to my own website

Birds and Men
Oil on canvas
30"x48"









Devils' Dance
Oil on canvas
30"x40"












The Triumph of Saint George
Oil on Canvas
48"x30"