Featured Oil Painting “Quest”

Posted on December 13, 2014 by mfsadmin

Quest
Oil on Canvas
16″ x 20″

My latest oil painting, Quest, is a mystery piece – whose underlying message, even evades my own grasp, as the painting was, once again, built upon an image visited my mind when I was in the state of between sleep and awake, repeating the experience inception of another featured painting, Father and Son.

The focus of Quest was a blurry figure, either a man or a woman, who gingerly and wearily treads on a bridge or a pathway, which could be floating on a vast body of water, or suspending in the sky. The weary traveler’s situation on the pathway was quite precarious, and he or she was in danger of slipping off the bridge; yet the traveler pressed on, hands raised, head bent and steps hesitant. Therefore, this painting could be interpreted as either a cautionary story, or a depiction of a spiritual journey, a journey or penance, a quest for truth, or relentless self-discovery. A quest.

The starry sky, in vibrant blue, decorated with moving yellowish green lights, was highly dramatic and textured, reflecting the turmoil inside the traveler; down below, there was a large body of smooth green water, interlaced with bright long red waves, soothing and seductive, pacifying yet can be just as dangerous as Narcissus’s pond.

This ambiguous, elusive and dichotomic piece reflects the perpetual anxiety of self-conscious human kind.

Featured Oil Painting “Father and Son”

Posted on November 24, 2014 by mfsadmin

Father and Son
oil on canvas, 20″x16″, 2013

Often, when I started to drift into sleep at night, my restless mind would conjure up some images more imaginative than I could think of when I was wide awake. Sometimes, during those dreamy moments, my mind kept its presence and I was able to rouse my in order to make a quick sketch or to, attempting to capture those fleeting impressions.

A recent such instance presented me an entangled group of tight embracing muscular bodies, in agony or ecstasy. In the end, my decipher of the image drew the conclusion that it presented the embrace and reconciliation of estranged persons who ought to be close to each other, father and son.

Base on that quick sketch, I made a monochromatic and muted yet quite evocative and powerful painting, on the theme of Prodigal Son.

The strength of this piece lies in its universal touching theme, the heartbreaking posture of those once broken men, the strong outlines of the figures and the high relief of the bodies.

The painting is small in format but big in the feelings it emotes.

Featured Oil Painting “Upstream”

Posted on October 29, 2014 by mfsadmin

Last week, I shipped to Seattle my 2008 oil painting, Upstream, which has been selected for the juried show, 2014 Evergreen Association of Fine Arts (EAFA) Open Exhibition, at EAFA Gallery in the Seattle Design Center (5701 Sixth Avenue South, Suite P292, Seattle, WA 98108).

This modest painting, measured 24″ by 18″, semi-abstract in style, clearly influenced by Chinese ink painting, depicts a fish or two struggles to swim upstream, against the current. It is fitting for the painting to travel to Seattle, because it was in that city when I witnessed an amazing salmon run in Chittenden Locks Fish Ladder several years ago.

Upstream
oil on canvas, 24″x18″, 2008

This painting was not a frank documentation of that fish ladder scene; rather, when I painted it, I was trying to capture a free spirit, a spirit to overcome adversaries. I deliberated chose a black and white color scheme, and a bold, almost abstract outline, as I was mostly interested in something elemental, less representational.

This work surely has a charmed life and earned a fair bit of recognitions – in 2009, it was published in The William and Mary Review by The College of William and Mary, Virginia, Volume 47.

Featured Oil Painting “July Meteors”

Posted on September 26, 2014 by mfsadmin

July Meteros
oil on canvas, 20″x16″, 2014

The title of this painting, July Meteors, originates from a Chinese phrase, 七月流火, which means that in July, when stars move westbound, cooler weather arrives soon; I have always been drawn to the mystic and somewhat fatalistic image of this concise yet profound phrase, without much understanding.

Right before the Fourth of July this year, suddenly there was some unexpected disturbances took place in my life and I was mostly assailed by shock and dismay, out of all things, and soon I was enveloped in a chill, much colder than the already too cool San Francisco summer.

It was the realization of abrupt and decisive change caused me much alarm and disquietness and then I suddenly understand the meaning of that phrase, and the helplessness sedimented through thousands years of valiant and often futile struggle, and composed this rather evocative abstract piece, to channel my compound feelings.

I entered this piece for a juried exhibition and silent auction at Berkeley Art Center and it was accepted for the event.

Exhibition: October 18-25, 2014
Gallery hours: Wednesday – Sunday 11:00am – 5:00pm

Silent Auction Fundraiser:
Saturday, October 25, 5-9 pm
– VIP Reception 5-6 pm $70 VIP Ticket
– Auction Main Event: 6-9 pm $40 Auction Ticket

Niobe – An Installation

Posted on August 24, 2014 by mfsadmin

I have always been drawn to tragic stories, particularly those of cosmic grandeur, often with Greek origins. The legend of Niobe, a proud princess and mother of fourteen children, seven sons and seven daughters (the Niobids), who boasted of her large family and jeered at goddess Leto, who had only two children, the twins Apollo and Artemis, resulting in unbearable tragedy, was one of my favorites.

Gods were not to be mocked at and the offended Leto sent her children to revenge her honor. Apollo and Artemis started to shoot arrows and killed Niobe’s sons and daughters one by one. Niobe’s plea to spare at least one daughter came too late, and none of her fourteen children were spared. The loss was so great, the grief so heavy, that Niobe turned into stone, yet even the stone continued to weep tears.

The Weeping Rock in Mount Sipylus, Manisa, Turkey, has been associated with Niobe’s legend since Antiquity, Source: RKTanitim

Since I started my “White Dress” series, I have been exploring the expressive possibilities of this motif and the results often took me by surprise, and further fanned my curiosity, and wanted to probe ever further.

Though my recent well-received “Stringed White Dresses – An Installation” was a success, I felt that the origami dresses in that installation were too prim, too orderly. I wanted to create something more chaotic. For the composition, I imagined a large dress, like a queen bee, surrounded by smaller ones; this fit the Niobe story perfectly.

After several attempts, I decided on the sizes of the dresses and chose white dresses to represent female and grey to represent male characters. Before I folded the origami dresses, I crumpled the paper to give them a more lively look. I put black ink and brown wash on paper to create the chaos in the background, some areas were covered with white oil wash to enrich the texture and to give more contrast to the dresses taped over the drawing paper, and finally some yellow oil streaks to suggest the ungodly gods’ touches.

To finish the entire assemblage, I pinned the little daughter Niobe tried to save onto her with a needle. Finally, I freely splashed black ink over the ensemble, and that constituted my final touch.

Niobe / 尼俄柏 / Niobe
Paper, Ink and Oil on Paper, Needle, Wooden Frames
33″ x 16.5″ x 3″
Completed in 2013

Gouache Painting “The Innocents: The Innocents – Dedicated to the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17”

Posted on July 27, 2014 by mfsadmin

The magnitude of the unspeakable tragedy of the downing of the civilian Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 by a mission in the war-torn region of eastern Ukraine was hard to fathom and absolutely cannot be accepted in a civil global society. Everyone with righteous mind mourns the loss of near 300 people, on their way to return to their homes, to see their friends and families, to go to work, or to make holidays.

I was deeply touched by the tragedy and channeled my feeling into a gouache painting, commemorate this utterly senseless tragedy.

The Innocents / 無辜者 / Unschuldige Personen – Dedicated to the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17
Gouache on Paper
8″ x 11.5″
Completed in 2014

Originally posted on my blog: The Innocents – Dedicated to the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 (20 July 2014)

Oil Painting “The Triumph of Saint George”

Posted on June 18, 2014 by mfsadmin

Just when the ill-conceived and ill-fated Iraq-invasion led by US president George W. Bush keeps and the prime minister of UK, Tony Blair, finally started to fade from our collective consciousness, it sprang back with vengeance in the tides of horrible stories and images.

Now, confronted with the terrifying aftermath of their reckless joint-decision, George W. Bush keeps mum, while Tony Blair tries desperately to white-wash his hands, yet however often he screamed “Out, damned spot! out, I say!”, his hands, together with those of GWB’s and Dick Cheney’s, would forever be stained with blood, gushed from the mangled bodies of US soldiers and Iraqi people.

During his horrible and incompetent presidency, George W. Bush (GWB) was often criticized as an imbecile ninny occupying a high office due to his fabulous family connection – his father Georg Bush was the president of the US from 1989 to 1993. To me, that argument was incorrect and way too benevolent. GWB did many horrible things not due to his stupidity, but his fundamental believe in those horrible things.

To me, this painting of mine below, The Triumph of Saint George, created during the time he was drumming up the invasion of Iraq in 2003, reflects what he was; the painting also jump-started my ongoing Apocalypse Series, to commemorate the miseries of humankind.

The Triumph of Saint George
oil on canvas, 48″x30″, 2003

11 Paintings Completed in 2003 (part 2 of 2)

I had hoped that what I depicted in that painting would be simply a warning sign, rather than, unfortunately, a most awful prophecy as it turned out.

History will remember George W. Bush and Tony Blair, not kindly. As an artist, it was my duty to record and reflect the time I live in.

Oil Painting “Interaction” – A Group Portraits

Posted on May 20, 2014 by mfsadmin

Painting portraits can be very challenging and rewarding – how to capture the spirits of the sitters, how to render the physiognomies and the postures faithfully yet with artists’s personal touches, how to connect the sitters to the viewers, and most importantly, to ensure the relevancy of painted portraits in the era of digital cameras and smartphones.

One of my best portraits was a group of young men, me in the middle and two college friends at the two sides of the canvas. We sat on stone benches, looking serious and somewhat despondent, and aimed our eyes away from another, into different directions. It was a moment of uncertainty, a private consultation in a group setting, a dialogue with oneself, and a congregation without exchanges. I titled it “Interaction”. My relatively broad brushstrokes rendered the bushes in the background a hallucinatory backdrop, and the deliberately bland facial features were economically outlined – a kind of abstraction.

Interaction / 交流 / Interaktion
Oil on Canvas
30″ x 48″
Completed in 2002

10 Paintings Completed in 2002 (part 1 of 2)

I am quite proud of this work, as it captured the spirit of then Chinese collage students, who were facing very uncertain futures, in the age of political corruption and crackdown around the time of 1989 Tian’anmen (Tiananmen) Massacre and a very harsh economic future. I just posted a blog on my trip to Beijing during the time the martial law was about to be declared in Beijing and the ordeals my fellow students and I endured during the sit-in on Tian’anmen Square, which will explain more of the background story to this painting, a souvenir of my youth: 25 Years Later, Smell of Exhausted Tian’anmen “Warriors” Lingered.

This painting was selected for 23rd Annual National Juried Exhibition, Berkeley Art Center, July 23 – August 26, 2006.

Oil Painting “Liberation Road”

Posted on April 26, 2014 by mfsadmin

My most accomplished painting to date is a portrait of an old woman, Grandma (2003), while its companion painting, Liberation Road (2010), is my most personal one.

Liberation Road
oil on canvas, 18″x24″, 2010
sold

17 Paintings Completed in 2010 (part 2 of 2)

This painting was based on a photo of my paternal great great grandmother, or maybe great grandmother, I do not really know for sure. She was a very elegant woman with a knowing look and her photo had often haunted me and caused me to wonder what had happened to her, to her family, to her descendants in the ensuring years – all those endless upheavals, wars, famine – human suffering of all kinds, from the end of the imperial time, the republican era and culminated in the so-called revolution in the mid-twentieth century. Furthermore, this painting also touched on the traumatic experiences my parents and my sibling and myself suffered in the iron grip of the Chinese Communist Party, or any totalitarian regime, even to this very day.

The left side of the painting showed ruined houses and railroads, balancing the right side of the portrait of my dignified grandmother. The horizontal road sign bisecting the painting read “Liberation Road”, yet at the end of the arrow, we saw a sorrow-stricken person, helplessly rested his/her head on the knees, anything but liberated. There was a similar figure, at the lower right of the painting, echoing this figure, in the same posture, though in profile.

I made this painting to pay tribute to my elegant ancestors who had striven to achieve personal enlightenment and successes and later suffered precisely for their achievements in the hands of the anti-intellectual and self-righteous puritanical Communist Party. By surrounding my great grandmother with ruins and other suffering people, I tried to demonstrate the scope of the destruction in the wake of the Communist Party.

I also made a short video (1:56) to present this rather haunting painting.

In order to show both the complete picture and its details as the “camera” panning across the canvas, I incorporated two video clips into one single final video and they can be played simultaneously. I deliberately kept my left clip static, so as to show the complete painting, while the right clip demonstrate the details, exactly as the video above.

Oil Painting “The Song of Orpheus”

Posted on March 26, 2014 by mfsadmin

I have always been drawn to the complex, intensely humane and deeply flawed characters in Greek mythology, and have made several paintings of based on several such figures, e.g. Minotaur, Daphne and Apollo, Helen of Troy, and Oedipus, etc.

One of my such efforts was an oil painting on the theme of Orpheus, one of the most famous musicians in human history, conceived while I was reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus.

That subject was a dangerous ground to tread into, because there were so many wonderful artworks had been created after this Orpheus myth, from paintings to operas; yet the lure of this myth and the reinterpretation by Rilke was so strong and irresistible, I pressed on.

My Orpheus was a collage of many variations of the much-told myth. My painting started with his descend into Hades to seek his beloved Eurydice, traveling on the River Styx. His lyre, which had persuaded Hades and Persephone to let Eurydice return to the earth, dominated the canvas. The lyre also took a shape of a strange animal, and was also a linkage to Apollo. After he had lost Eurydice for the second time, the grief driven Orpheus refused to entertain Dionysus’ followers who in their rages ripped him to pieces. His skull became an oracle and his flesh and bones were tossed into sky, scattered about and filled the universe with his music.

Thus the marriage of Apollonian and Dionysian spirits ushered in a new era.

The Song of Orpheus
oil on canvas, 30″x24″, 2010

I saw Orpheus as the means to bring joy and meaning to the world, through his irrepressible quest for love and his suffering, and ultimately his death. I saw his lyre singing and I saw his bones being scattered into the highest sphere, just like his notes would have crowned the heaven. Holy ointment burned in his skull, which had transformed into an oracle, rising up to dance with his ever higher notes. That’s The Song of Orpheus.

Matthew Felix Sun

— Award-Winning San Francisco Bay Area Fine Artist

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