"Yellow Daisy" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

My wife, Song, had some leftover yellow daisies sitting in the corner of our kitchen after her ikebana meeting. I put them on my still life stand and did this painting almost en plein air. I really had hard time when I started. The value range was very narrow, the purples and yellows are almost the same in value and temperature. It was so abstract at the beginning that I almost gave it up. I straggled through and kind of like how it turned out. I like to have the painting as abstract as possible but keep the accuracy so the painting still representational. I will be in Dallas, TX this weekend teaching my third workshop of the year. Keep checking and I will keep you posted.

"Demo at Phoenix 2" --- Sold

My second demo was to show how to paint roses. I made everybody very tense at the workshop. I was painting very slowly, making sure every stroke counts. I painted quite a few roses by now, but I still feel it is tremendously challenging. I wish I could have practiced more, because I have not seen much progress in my rose paintings for a while. I am working on freeing more time for painting this year. So far I have not seen any effect. But I am trying. Although I am teaching, but I don't feel I know much more than my students. Many of artists attending my workshops are spectacular painters. They inspire me and help me grow. I am really grateful about that.

"Demo at Phoenix 1" --- Sold

I have spent 3 wonderful days in Phoenix AZ, and had a really great time. Before this trip, I did not know that Phoenix and Scottsdale are so close. I arrived on last Thursday afternoon. It happened to be the date of the Scottsdale gallery walk. All galleries were open to very late hours. A local artist named Li Mahalik picked me up, and we went to see great art in Scottsdale. I was amazed to see so many great paintings there. I have learned quite a bit. Arizona is so beautiful. It changed my idea about desert completely. The saguaros are so huge. I really like their shapes. I wish I did some plein air there. The workshop went very well. I really appreciate the hard work of Li Mahalik and Sue Hunter for putting this workshop together. I made many new friends. Thank you very much for coming. This painting is my first demo at the workshop.

"Tangerine Ensemble" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

I interrupted my research on white colors and come back to my usual way of painting for my today's post. The R&D will keep going, and I will keep you posted. In about an hour, I will be on my way to Phoenix AZ for my 2nd workshop teaching this year. I will let you know how it goes in my next post. See ya.

"White Study"

Click Here to Bid

Another paintingless week has passed solidly. I finally got some time because today is a holiday. I am continuing my research on colors of white objects. I have two lights for this still life: one warm and one cool. I think I am getting a little closer now to my goal. The table cloth still needs some work, but objects are not bad. Compared with my usual way using high chroma colors for the center of focus. This type of painting definitely makes a change. I will do more "white" paintings to achieve the ability of controlling the subtle changes in colors.

LOVE TO SONG

Today is the Valentine's Day, and the Chinese New Year as well. I want to devote my today's post to my beloved wife. Song and I met in high school. We married in Alabama. For 17 years, she has been on my side from the Deep South to New England, from California to Texas. We have gone through together the hardship of the first generation of immigrants. We have enjoyed every progress in our small family. When I feel blue, she cheers me up. When I lost, she is my best guide. When I feel tired, she is my Yoga teacher and acupuncturist. Without her help and support, I can't imagine my art can be successful. Many of you have met her in my workshops and shows. Recently she starts to organize workshops. English language and computer operation are big challenges for her, but she works very hard and progressed wonderfully. I feel I am very fortunate and grateful for being with her. The art I share with you today is a pastel portrait of my dear wife I did many years ago, and I want to say: Song, I love you forever!

"Solid Imagination 2" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

Yes. It is the same white cup. As many of you following my blog, I consider myself a beginner painter. I need to learn a lot to improve my art. I don't meant to bore you, but I really need to study my colors on white objects. It shouldn't be very hard, but I am not there yet. I will work and work until that "Aha" effect clicks.

Across both fields of art and science. I sensed the major difference on the way people communicate. Scientists are very sensitive on words. They define their vocabularies precisely. The invented mathematics to extend their logic and make sure their statements are quantitatively measurable. They set up conventions to make sure their discussion on the common bases. They exchange ideas in massive amount of conferences and symposiums. They try to avoid "reinvent the wheel". However, in art, at least from my limited observation, the communication is rather nebulous. Many masters claimed that art can not be talked about and can not be analyzed. We are pretty much on our own. We have to "invent our own wheels" on the individual bases. Our rules are made to be broken. I heard cases that some art teachers bring students to the paint-out spot and disappeared. Some art school teachers hide themselves from their students. Maybe I am naive, but I still think art can be taught and learned.

"Demo at Sacramento 2" --- Sold

This is my second demo painting at Sacramento. Painting roses is rather tricky. You can't overwork on them. Make sure very brush stroke counters. Observe more and paint less. I hope all the workshop attendees have learned some and achieved some improvement on your art.

Time goes really fast. My second workshop is coming up in less than two weeks. I will go to Phoenix, AR. I think we still have a couple of spots available. If you are interested in attending this one, please contact Sue Hunter at: suehunter7@cox.net.

New Workshop Announcement

Painting by Zhaoming Wu

When I was in California a couple of days ago, I visited my friend and teacher Zhaoming Wu. To many of you, Zhaoming is not a stranger. His incredible portrait and figurative work have made him very famous. You can see his marvelous paintings and drawing at: http://www.zhaomingwu.com/. Currently, Zhaoming is a full time professor teaching graduate students at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Not everybody has the immediate opportunity to study from him at the university. However, I do have good news for you: Zhaoming Wu is going to teach a 8-day workshop this August in Corciano, Italy. Following is the workshop announcement from Zhaoming:

After several years of receiving requests for workshops, I am pleased to announce in August 2010 a painting workshop held in the beautiful country of Italy. It will be a 12 day event with 8 days of painting instruction. Please see brochure for more details. If you would like more information regarding this workshop including costs, itinerary, and registration details, please email Jason Bowen – Italy Workshop Director at jasonbowenart@att.net. You may also contact Jason directly by phone at 925-323-0664 for specific questions that you may have regarding the workshop.

"Demo at Sacramento 1" --- Sold

Last weekend I taught a 3-day workshop at the Capital Art Center in Sacramento. I want really thank Patris Miller for organizing it. It was a wonderful three days. I enjoyed so much meeting old and new friends. This one is my first demo painting.

I came back last night and found there are many things need to be taken care of right away. I may not be able to paint for a while. Many of you have found that my website was down. I have figured out the problem and just fixed it. The response of Calvin Liang's workshop is phenomenal. We have got many more than 15 people in a very short time. Song is communicating with Calvin to see if he can give two in a row. Even with two, we will still have to put many people on the waiting list. Without any rest, I came to work this morning and ran into the rat race immediately. I think my humpty dumpty is falling. I am trying my best to call all the kings horses come a little earlier.

"Bottle and Grapes" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

I am on my way to Sacramento, CA to teach my first workshop of 2010. I usually I go to northern CA every spring attending the Photonics West International Conference and Trade Show at the Silicon Valley, But this trip is purely for art. It feels so different. I will be back to Austin next Tuesday. Any sold paintings will be shipped after I come back. I will also let you know what happening on the west coast.

New Workshop Announcement

Painting by Calvin Liang

My experiences in painting have told me that having good art teachers is crucially important, especially for beginner artists. In order to promote high quality art education in the central Texas area, my wife and I decide to start a new endeavor in art. We will invite artists selectively coming to Austin to give workshops. I am very happy to announce that the well-known California artist Calvin Liang will give our first invitational workshop. He will teach a 5-day plein air landscape painting workshop on October 25 – 29, 2010. If you are interested in learning from Calvin, please check the workshop flyer. This workshop has been limited to 15 students. Please contact Yuehong Song at yuehongsong188@yahoo.com for detailed information and registration. Thanks so much for your attention.

"Blue Monday" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

I got so many feedbacks on my white cup painting. I wish I could reply all your kind emails and comments personally. Thank you all very very much. I will practice what I learned from you and report to you in the near future. At this moment, I just want to share one thing that I have learned. The major reason I did not see much colors on my white cup was my light. I am using a color corrected spot light. The light was so concentrated on the object and environment surrounding it was in dark, so I did not have different colored light reflected into the cup. This friend suggested I should look at my object under daylight, and I did. It was strikingly difference. Now I got some idea to improve my illumination, and I will demonstrate to you later.

I named my today's painting "Blue Monday" maybe not very relevant. It reflects more my mood today rather than the painting. I am a little blue today, but it is all right. Life goes on and more paintings will come out.

"Solid Imagination" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

Painting color from a non-colored object has been a big challenge to me. I have tried and tried many times painting a white cup, but I don't think I have got it. This one is another try. I stared at this stupid cup for about two hours, and I really did not see much colors from it. But I don't want to do another value painting any more. So you see quite a few colorful grays on the cup. Those are colors in my mind. I will keep trying until I figure out how the color of grays are formed on a neutral color object. If you know the trick or you know some one is good at it, please help me out.

"In a Cool Spot" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

Using temperature contrast to enhance the colors at the center of focus is an effective method to make the painting looks more colorful.

"Round and Square" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

I love holidays. This long weekend makes it possible for me to paint daily. Many people asked me: how can you do so many things? You work full-time; have a family, and you still have time painting, teaching workshops, and managing an art business. Be honest to you, I CAN'T, but I try my best to use every fragment of time possible. At my day job, I do not go out for lunch, so I have some time to check emails and posting on my blog. I hardly watch any TV, and use my evening as much as possible. Weekends are luxurious. I really enjoy being a full time artist for a day or two. I am not ambitious and let thing happen naturally. Do I recommend my life style to others? Actually, NO. This fast paced modern life is very unhealthy. Life should be more relaxed, having more time for leisure. I am having this fast-food kind of life now in order to have the opposite in the future. So wish me luck.

"Beauty of Simplicity" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

Another week without painting passed by solidly. I was rat racing in the labs in Texas and New Jersey. Perhaps my boss has found my negative words in my earlier posts toward corporate culture, and planned to punish me deliberately. I was given a work load so unrealistic that I will fail for sure and look bad. 3000 feet above sea level, among IPhone fumblers and laptop gazers, I opened "The Good Life" by Helen and Scott Nearing. A glare of the Sun was reflected to my eyes from a tiny speck of water surface down there. Maybe it was from the "Walden Pond". Men! the picture I was in was absolutely surreal. People have to be crazy to be normal....... I forced myself and did this small painting late Friday night.

"Orange Crystals" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

Can you believe it? I didn't get a chance to touch my brushes for an entire week. Art can be killed just like that. I was so busy tweaking optics in my lab that I even have no time to check my emails during the day. If you are more lucky than I am, please help me to paint more. If you think you could wait till tomorrow to paint, please pick your brush today. We are obligated to make this world more beautiful. Finally on Sunday afternoon, I did this small painting. I am still in the mode of doing low key paintings. I was testing of using translucent light as my center of focus. I think it works well.

"Sweet Mirage"

Now the holiday season is over. I am back to my cubicle babbling technical jargons. This is the last painting I did from my holiday break. It will be sent to a gallery show. I keep the background rough deliberately. Do you like it? My paintings recently are kind of tight. I am going back and forth, looking for my balance point. Sometimes, tight paintings are good, but I prefer looser styles.

"Quiet Festivity"

Happy 2010! I opened my mailbox this morning and very excited to see a certificate from the Oil Painters of America. It is my OPA signature membership. Now I am allowed to put OPA after my name. What a wonderful new year gift I received. This is an import milestone. I did this gallery painting on the first day of the new year. I might send this one to this year's OPA national show.

"Color Cascade"

I am in the process of generating several larger paintings for gallery shows. This is the first one. It is rather an abstract one. I was trying to create a flow of light and color. It is always fun painting flowers. After you have managed the anatomy of the flowers, you will feel much of freedom and creativity. Let's put all the hard times of 2009 behind us. Let this cascade of beauty make your New Year more exciting. 2010 is coming. I wish all of you good luck. Thank all of you for being with me and supporting me.

"Flute and Roses" --- Sold

This one took me three days to paint. I feel happy that the painting does not show much of over work. This year went by so fast. Now we are at the end of it. As a painter, I feel very lucky, because painting helped me "freeze" the time. Every painting I did is a milestone. It reminds me what I was thinking at the moment I was creating that image. When we are getting old, our physical memory does not work as well as we were young. We hardly remember what we did yesterday. However, if you are a painter, you can archive your life so vividly. I am really blessed.

"Being in the Dark" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

Darkness is full of mystery. We often feel insecure in it. However, the darkness implies potential. We have more room to grow. I put the background of this painting is completely darkness. It gives the vastest contrast for the center of focus to stand out. By the way, I didn't use any blacks. The background was done with Phthalo blue and Alizarin Crimson.

"Echo of the Void" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

The painting is so typical of David Leffel's style. I am learning how to paint space. Although the size of the painting is only 8" x 10", do you feel the painting is quite large? I really like this one. I think I got what Sherrie and David told me finally.

Now is the morning of the Christmas day. I haven't unwrapped my presents yet, but I have felt blessed already, because I have got the most precious gift --- TIME today. This is my first time posting a painting so early in the morning. Please accept it as my present to you all. I wish all of you have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Thanks to all of you for your constant support. Now I will go to our small Christmas tree, and I will have a lot of fun with my family today.

"Everyday Christmas"

Click Here to Bid

I should have been painting in my evening hours, but I didn’t get chance to do that lately. Instead, I have been learning QuickBooks and trying to get some bookkeeping going. Nowadays, people like me don’t have the luxury to concentrate on the art development. We have to take care of everything. Too bad we have only 24 hours and I spend the best part of it onto the boring stuff to make a living (a very interesting phase). The art projects always are the first bunch falling into cracks. Life is hard, and more and more complicated, but I am still optimistic. I can’t develop my art at the pace I wanted it to be, but it is at least progressing day by day. I felt the year went by so fast, and the holiday season is here again. I am satisfied. I have achieved a lot in my art with the meager time and energy I have.
In my today’s painting, I am still experimenting with what I learned from Sherrie. I will let the future decide weather or not I would keep this approach. The painting is a little larger (8” x 8”) and I put greens and reds on my setup. I hope our regular days will be as merry as Christmas. Happy holidays.

"Yellow Roses Under Cool Light" --- Sold

I did this painting for a friend. I am not going to talk too much today. Please enjoy.

"Orange Spiral" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

After my previous post, I received many comments, and most of people disagreed with me this time. How big the object is too big is a very subjective matter. Since I was attending Sherrie’s (and David’s) workshop, I did not want to do what I usually do. I really want to sense their way of judgment. Painting objects relatively small is part of the secrecy of the David Leffel style. David is painting the void. Using the subtle and smooth background and less occupied foreground, he sets up the boundary of the void to generate the effect of spaciousness. That is why David’s and Sherrie’s paintings have impacted us so strongly. So I don’t mind to create similar effect on my painting as well. Now, since we are talking about learning from the masters, I want to share some my experiences. At the class, I hardly taking any notes, but I pay a real attention to their demos. The masters communicate with you using visual language. So you need to listen with your eyes instead of your ears. The verbal part of their teaching is quite secondary to me. I hardly remember any their words. However, if you get a good result or some light bulbs start to blinking, make sure you document it verbally so you can remember better and organize the good effects into your own system. Moreover, if I may say some words to our beloved master artists who teach as well, I will say: Teaching is very left-brain process. To help the students to grow and also not mislead them, the teacher needs to do massive amount of work to translate the visual language into a verbal one, and present it in a systematic way. If there is a short of vocabulary, please create some. I heard Eskimos could identify many more kinds of snows than most of us. We artists should be able to describe many different kinds of grays verbally and pass them on to our students.

"Frontyard Harvest" --- Sold

Click Here to Bid

We have an orange tree in the front yard. My son, Jonathan, picked one with leaves on it. I did many orange paintings, but I really like this one because the leaves provide more shape variation. After I talked in my blog about studying with Sherrie McGraw. I received quite a few emails and comments asking about what I really learned from her. Very simple, she said I painted my objects too big. This painting is good start for improvement. I made the orange relatively small and gave more space to the background, so the painting appears larger. When Sherrie mentioned that I painted my objects too big, I suddenly realized that David Leffel told me the same thing. Many years ago I took workshop with David. I was concentrated in painting and suddenly I heard several Chinese words: "Qiang Tai Da"(meaning: Qiang, it is too big). It was David. He knows quite many Chinese words. This time Sherrie pointed out same problem again. I realized that a problem can be so persistent. It is amazing that it takes so many years for me to understand a simple instruction like "too big", even it was in my native language.

"A Yellow Rose of Texas" --- Sold

Although I came to America more than twenty years ago, but I still do not know the culture well enough. I did this painting a couple of days ago and wanted to find a good name for it. I heard the term "yellow rose of Texas", but I did not know exactly what it meant. So I "googled" it. The "Wikipedia" says it is the title of a song. I clicked a video link and listened to it. Actually I heard this tune before, but just didn't know its title. I am learning everyday. Just at that moment, suddenly, my computer crashed. I couldn't get the screen to move. Coincidentally, our company IT person was passing my cube, I stopped him to asked him to check my machine. He stared at my screen and said: "You knew that "Yellow Rose of Texas" is a gentleman's club in Austin, didn't you?" .......Oh! ..........

"Enchant in Subtlety"

Click Here for Purchase information

At Sherrie's workshop, I only did two paintings. the one I posted previously took me relatively shorter time. However, this one took me almost two days. Remember I was talking about learning from her how to create drama. This one is my experiment. The setup was done completely by Sherrie. When I started to paint, I felt I was powerlessly disarmed. You know I like to use high chroma colors, high contrast value range, and expressive bush works. I had none of those with this project. The color and value of the pot is almost the same as those of the background. The shapes of the arrangement were complicated and irregular. The roses were dying (they withered and died completely on the second day). I almost ran away from it. Well, I am glad I did not. I suffered through. And I started to appreciate the subtlety of the setup. It gives more potential for me to express, and the painting quality will be elevated to the next level. It is so great to see the opportunities. Did I show more "drama" in this one?