“Shadow” Over the Land – Featured Painting

My landscape/allegorical oil painting, Shadow, depicts a fantastic world - a vast furrowed dark brown field, whose parallel ridges converge towards the distant horizon, which was dotted with a cluster of very insignificant white buildings, centering on a little church spire, which was barely visible. The contrast between the enormous dark fields and the tiny white village is highly dramatic, yet that is topped by several huge leaden and apparently weighty clouds, which curiously cast no shadows; instead, adds mysterious and menacing atmosphere, gliding over the entire field, s a huge shadow of an invisible bird, very much the personification of foreboding.


Shadow / 影子 / Schatten
Oil on Canvas
30″ x 40"
Completed in 2008

Interestingly, this painting just joined a group show, titled "In to the Future". Perhaps, this ominous world is the vision of the future?

Originally posted on my website: Featured Works.

Dad's Art

While discussing art marking with my mother in China, I inevitably thought about if I had done any art project with my father.  Thinking of my dad, the first image I had was always his reading or writing at night, by himself, or occasionally to me and my sister, usually during the time when my mother had to work on night shift as resident doctor, one night shift every four days.  Dad often read for us fables and fairy tales by the likes of Pushkin or Aesop.  He has always been more a man of letters and words.  After my parents' retirements, Mom has taken up paintings while Dad is spending more time on calligraphy.

However, I do remember one particular "art project" Dad worked on, when I was very little and alas, those experiences actually were near traumatic for me.  I grew up in a materially scarce time and the electricity could go out often and every household had candles for such occasions.  Several times, when this happened, Dad would pin several large sheets of newsprint paper on the wall, and drew with ink and brush the silhouette of our enlarged and dancing head shadows cast on the paper by the flickering candlelight.  The golden glow of the candle light was mystic and the productions of those shadow profiles were both intimate and strange.  Those moments were magical.

Yet, the solid black mass on paper was terrifying for the timid me and I do admit freely that I was often scared by my dad's such endeavors, though I did love it when it occurred. I had the same aversion at the time to the dark and twisted, yet immensely wonderful and intense drawings by Käthe Kollwitz.

After I had enough life experiences of my own, many of them bleak and stark, I obtained great appreciation for the psychologically penetrating art of Kollwitz, and for the simplistic yet fascinating shadow profiles created by my dad.

Inspired, I made such simple shadow drawings, just for fun:





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Art of Shade

In my recent blogs The Beauty of Lines and Art from Ancient Worlds at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, I used two images below, taken in my office and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.





Those images made me realized that much beauty to be found in the shadows therefore I made an effort to find something unique.  In one lunch break, I was able to collect a group of images below, intricate or simple, tender, lonesome or whimsical:

The Beauty of Lines

While having work lunch on the balcony of my office building - a modern and slightly musclar structure, I was struck by the light and shadow interplay on the wall. The straight lines of the shawdow cast by the huge overhead beam and the reflection from the metal surfaces created a wonderful pattern of bright and dark interplay and the beauty of these lines were wonderful to behold.