"Young Artist 2"

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I did a painting called "A Young Artist" many years ago. That boy must be a handsome young man now. Almost at the same location, I shot another photo a couple of weeks ago. Now this artist is doing almost exactly the same thing, innocent with the same concentration. Is the time really exist? I doubt it. If we don't individualize, We have already lived in the Eternity.

"Plein Air Painting at Tucson 3"

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This is my third plein air piece at Tucson. On the fourth day of the convention, we went to the Old Tucson. I feel a little better than my previous one. The light and shadow is more obvious. I can handle it better. However, my feel is not strong. How to get a strong feeling in front of the scene is not easy. I have more feeling when I setup my still lives, but for landscape I have not got there yet. Need more learning.

"Plein Air Painting at Tucson 2"

I use my blog to document my painting activities including successful ones and failed ones. My today's post is about a failure. On the second day of the Plein Air Convention, we painted at the Catalina State Park, where has beautiful scenes of mountains and saguaros. I was overwhelmed by what I saw, and having a hard time to decide what to paint. The light changed quickly, and finally I find a piled of ruck with cactus with a back light. The shadow colors were beautiful, so I decided to give a try. I was rushed for about 30 minutes, then the light was gone. I barely got some value and no time to think about colors at all. That was I had. How do you like it?

"Last Territory" --- Sold

From April 15 to 19, I have attended the Plein Air Convention at Tucson, AZ. It was a wonderful event. I met many wonderful artists and so happy of seeing many old friends. This one is a plein air piece I did. I admire so many great artists having the ability of painting mountains and saguaros, because I can't. So I hid in a place not many people can see me and painted this wagon.

"Xidi Doorway 6"

Now this is the last (No. 5) painting I did on Derek's workshop. I used my own ref. photo this time. You probably have seen my other Xidi doorway paintings before. They were more monochromatic. Now this one is colorful. Do you like it? I am not sure myself. The painting definitely not as rigid as before. I have enjoyed the freedom, which I did not have before. However, do you like the color? let me know please. Thanks.

"Derek's Trees"

This is my 4th painting on Derek Penix's workshop. It is the best one I did during his class I think. Trees are not my cup of coffee (or tea) for sure. I felt lucky I have run into a few happy accident during painting this one. I like the colors and the harmony. I am glad I did not use much of the green colors in painting the leaves.

"Derek's Boat"

I did this painting yesterday on Derek's workshop. I started to practice the Impressionistic way of using colors. Since boats have more has more rigid structure, I felt more comfortable than the day before. I have really hard times doing rocks and waves because they don't have a regular structure I can following. It is really a good thing that an artist knows his/her weak points. If you work on improving your weak points, you will progress quickly to reach the next level.

"My first seascape"

This is my very first seascape painting. I am not particularly like it, but here it is: a milestone for me.

"A yellow bird" --- Sold

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I felt so great to be a student again. For quite a few years I have not taken any workshops from other artists. I was so busy teaching, and forgot that I have run out of juice. Although I am research and investigate art issue by myself, but that is not enough. Now I am at the Scottsdale Artist School taking a workshop from Derek Penix. I really like Derek's impressionistic approach of colors, and his delicious impasto brush textures. I am so happy learning from him. This is my very first bird painting.  It is not too bad. I start to feel something new.

"Demo at Jackson Hole 2015 3" --- Sold

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I am back home now. Yellowstone was breathtakingly beautiful. I took tons of photos. I hope some day I may paint from all of those beautiful references.

This painting was done on the 3rd day of my Jackson Hole workshop. Because I didn't have wifi in side the National Parks, I had to delay the posting of it. This is one of best floral paintings I have ever done. Painting orange colored roses was my first time, but I immediately fall in love with it. I also like the leaves. I don't know the name of those leave, but their color and shape are much of fun for painting. The cool green color of the leaves enhances the flower significantly. I just love it. You can see I hardly painted any rose leaves. Those flowers were from a grocery store. The rose leaves are all folded badly. I can hardly use them for the painting.

You may have noticed that my composition for these kind of floral demo is lack of variation. They are pretty much the same. I am aware of that, but I have do one thing at a time. I am concentrated on dramatize the shapes and texture of the flowers and leaves now. The time will come and I will progress.

This painting is available for purchase.

"Demo at Durango 2015 3" --- Sold

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The 3rd demo at Durango was a plein air painting in a rose garden. I showed how I re-organized all the flowers so they could form a composition I wanted, and how important of going slow and not over working. I saw quite many good rose paintings from that day's exercise.

After my Durango I traveled quite a few places. I have visited the Mesa Verde National Park, Telluride, Glenwood Springs, and just arrived at Jackson Hole WY. I was stunned by all the breath taken beauty of all those places.

"Demo at Durango 2015 2" --- Sold

My Durango workshop is mainly a plein air one. We have spent three days outdoors. This is my second Demo. I painted this in one of downtown neighborhoods. It happened being of one of the busy  traffic area. Many local people were curious about what we were doing in the streets. Even the local Newspaper came and reported our class. Durango is a lovely town. I like the culture here. People here are so bohemian, healthy, sporty, down-to-earthy, new-agy. What a wonderful place to live.

"Grapes and Roses" --- Sold

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Recently I have been testing of using painting panels from "SourceTek". I like the surface texture. It requires the artist to use more paint, but the resulted painting is much richer.

"Water Lily and Fountain"

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I did this plein air painting this morning. This is a test of using a limited palette: cadmium yellow lemon, alizarin, ultramarine blue, ivory black, and white. It was quite interesting. The limited palette really helped to obtain the color harmony, but it was too cool. I finally put some cadmium red light (the gold fish in the pond) to warm it up.

The painting is cool, and weather is cool as well. It was excellent day today. The temperature was 88 F with a cool breeze. I can't believe it happens in July at Austin, Texas.

"Dance in Light" --- Sold

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"To get a good composition, do not put the object right at the center of the canvas". It is not true. I like what I have done on this painting.

“Purple and Green" --- Sold

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I did this demo on my Austin mentor class. Purple and Green are too super important colors for painting. I am doing a significant amount of research on them.

I have been enjoying my longest stay at home. I did a few serious paintings, and progressed quite a bit in understanding and exploration. It looks this period of quiet time comes to the end pretty soon. Next week I will start another phase of my workshop teaching.

"Three Quarters of an Orange"

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This is a demo to my mentoring class. It is a difficult color scheme, but it is a good experiment. I am curious about what kind of psychological effect of viewing a large area of alizarin crimson. Somehow I feel dark purple in painting is always difficult, but I tried anyway. If you don't try, you will never know.

"The Blue Vase" --- Sold

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This blue vase, well it should be called the vase with blue to be more accurate, has found me in an antique store on Amelia Island, FL. I immediately know it will be in many of my paintings in the future. So this is the first one.

After painting cityscape and seascape for several days, I felt I start to lose control. I want to back off a little. So today I returned to still life. I want to practice more on my high key approach so I can feel more comfortable with it.

"Blue Duet" --- Sold

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Back to Austin now. I did this painting with my Austin mentoring group. I feel my high key art is getting more stabilized. I started to understand why some of my old high key painting didn't work well. I have document my feeling into so called "principles" to guide my future practice and share them in my teachings. For instance: Cool colors work better with high key paintings, while warm colors work better with low key paintings. This kind of "home made principles" help me coming out the blind "just do it" or pure intuitive approaches to art. They also made it easier to share with other artists. To make a joke: In science, when someone made a significant discovery, people put his/her name with the discovered effect, such as Omh's Law and Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Why shouldn't I called my understanding the "Huang's principle". Ha Ha. I am just kidding. Art is different from Science. In science, people try not to "reinvent the wheel". However in art, every artist have to invent his/her wheel themselves.

"Blue Umbrella" --- Sold

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Two days have been spent on this painting. 90% of the time, I just stared at the board thinking. "Painting by not painting" was the goal for this painting project. I tried to paint as less as I can but wanted to show as much as possible. I painted rather abstractly, but still representational. The process was painstakingly slow, but it looks spontaneous and fast. Do all of these sound oxymoron to you? Maybe I should call this approach: the oxymoron style.