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

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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:
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Xinle Ruin in Shenyang, China

My home city Shenyang, despite being outside historical Chinese empire till just a couple centuries ago, it does boast a few cultural and historical relics, one of which was the 6,800-7,200 years old, late neolithic period Xinle Ruin.

Modern sculptures depicting activities and people during that time, or replica of some important finding, greeted visitors at the entrance and frontal plaza.






Sun Bird Column, based on a wood-sculptured bird unearthed on site

There were some atmospheric replica huts on the ground, surrounding a few protected spots, which preserved the site when being excavated in modern time.


Replica Huts





In a modest museum behind the sites and the reconstructed huts, some interest discoveries were on display, including nuts, stoneware, clay vessels, and as the center piece, a wood-sculptured bird unearthed there, which was the earliest cultural relic in Shenyang, as well as one of oldest wood sculptures found anywhere in the world. Perhaps, it was too precious, so only the replica was on display.


Sun bird, Wood sculpture replica




Tree Nuts, Nut Shell


Clay Potteries




Stone Leaves


Stone Arrows


Pottery Vessel







I found these strange- and primitive- looking vessels the aesthetic highlight of the exhibition.

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Featured Drawing "Formation"

The monotonous grayness of the cold climate landscape, though off-putting to some, holds special attraction for me, perhaps, nostalgia is the root of such attachment. I love the blanketing quietness stealthily imposed upon the environment, and appreciate the occasional higher values (not necessarily more vibrant colors) which enliven the space rhythmically and musically. My charcoal drawing Formation is such a presentation of the cool, unyielding, yet not totally unfriendly northern place which tenderly and harshly nurtured my growth. Almost puritanical, yet beautiful in its heart-rending austere bleakness.


Formation
11.5” x 18”
Charcoal on Paper
Completed in 2018
Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com


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Featured Painting "Birches"

A vision serendipitously visited me, and my subsequent partially-successful effort to capture it, resulted in a sparse and drawing like oil painting, Birches. The vision I pursued was a field of blurry birch woods, with the outlines of those slender white trunks emerging and disappearing constantly into darker background, as if the constant ripples of a vast waterbody. My final painting looked almost like the negative of that vision - bright serene background, on which floated silhouettes of several birch trunks, branches, and leaves, isolated or in clusters, in panoramic view, or zoomed-in detail.

 
Birches
22" x 28"
Oil on Canvas 
Completed in 2018

Originally posted on matthewfelixsun.com


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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"
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- My Featured Painting - Procession
- Featured Painting - Waft
- Featured Painting - Remembrance
- Featured Painting “Mirage” – A World of Ambiguity