"Demo at Wethersfield 2012 1" --- Sold

Trying to capture the last glimpse of the dazzling New England foliage. I have arrived at Wethersfield CT yesterday. This morning I started another workshop teaching at the Wethersfield Academy for the Arts. I want thank Betty Standish and Sandy Wakeen for organizing this workshop. Thanks to all the New England artists coming and painting with me. This is my first demo. Recently, I have so many workshops back to back, and I have shown all my demo work. I hope you are not tired of those paintings. They have similarities, but they are not all the same. I am learning every time when I do one.

"Demo at New Braunfels 2012 3"

Well, I don't know I should call this painting a demo or not. I did this one as a way to improve my teaching. I asked all workshop artists paint along with me so they can get familiar with my approaches step by step. The reaction is very positive. I will involve this way of teaching in my future workshops.

Now, I am back to my studio, and taught a couple of children's art classes over the weekend. Tomorrow I am on my road again. Nowadays, my life is so dynamic. I started to lose track where I have traveled to. It is a busy life, but it is good life. I wish I have started my art journey a little earlier. I would have more energy and more potential. So if you are also want to follow your heart and chase your dreams, do it as soon as possible. Do it Now. Yes, I am talking to YOU.

"Demo at New Braunfels 2012 2" --- Sold

As usual my second demo involves flowers. Because I didn't provide enough water to my models, they did not last long enough. I tried my best to give them a healthy look, well they just barely made it. Nevertheless, I felt very happy about  the silver pot in the back.

"Demo at New Braunfels 2012 1" --- Sold

I have arrived at New Braunfels, TX yesterday afternoon. Another workshop started this morning. I want to thank New Braunfels Art League, Cindy Capitena, and Gaye Sekula for putting this workshop together. Thanks to all attending artists from all over. We have so many interesting props. I selected a few and did this demo. It was really fun.

"Demo at Montgomery 3" --- Sold

Upon everybody's request, I did a third demo for the workshop. This one is high key. High key provides me more opportunity for color. Have you seen the dance of warm and cool?

I have really enjoyed the southern hospitality at Montgomery, and got more southern accent in my English. I came back yesterday, but a few hours later I will be on the road again. I will tell you where I am going at my next post.

"Demo at Montgomery 2"

As usual, my second demo was showing how to paint flowers. I had a rather aggressive setup. I was a little concerned if I could finish the demo before lunch, but the result was pleasant. I felt satisfied with the two demos I did so far. My recent study of color designing has definitely shown positive effect on these demo paintings.

"Demo at Montgomery 1" --- Sold

Hello from Montgomery Alabama. This is the first demo painting I did on my 3-day workshop here. I want to thank Sybil Dees for her wonderful job of organizing this workshop. I was so moved when I saw her meeting me at the airport on a wheelchair. I admire her courage and determination in carrying out a superb job under the condition of  facing significant personal challenges. In this world of art, I am so privileged of meeting so many wonderful people. I have learned much more than I taught. I feel so humbled and grateful. I am so excited seeing a few old friends and meeting many more new friends here. Thank YOU-ALL so much for attending my class.

"Asian Pear" --- Sold

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Now I resume my color study. This is my third attempt to establish a color scheme for purple. In this painting I use yellow to establish a complementary scheme with purple, since I have understood that high chroma for purple is very difficult to achieve. The highest chroma of the purples is only 43, but it looks pretty intense due to the contrast with the yellow. I didn't use any cadmium yellow colors. What you see here are yellow ochre and naples yellow. I deliberately keep the chroma of the yellow low, so the purple will stand out more, but I find out during my color mapping that even yellow ochre has a very high chroma (95). I feel better with this painting than the two I did before, but I need to go further.

"Half Orange" --- Sold

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After about two weeks of color design study, I decided to take a break.  I did this painting with my usual approach. I took off my ice skating shoes, and walk normally. I hope I can bring more enjoyment to you as well. I need some time to breath in, and breath out. Calm down and relax. The journey of art keeps on going. So please enjoy the process.

BTW, I do have question: Is there a color very very dark but opaque? I would appreciate if you let me know. Thanks.

"The color purple 2"

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This is my second data point for purple. Analogous is my color scheme and main color is purple. I understood now I can't tint too much from the tube color if I want to keep the chroma high. So I select a dark purple object. I used dioxazine purple. After the painting I did a color mapping (that is the color analysis tool I developed a week ago) on it. I found that the chroma of the tube color of dioxazine purple is not very high (63 out of 100). The slight tinting I did decreases the chroma to 55, which is very similar to what I did in my previous purple study. I am still not there yet, but I surely know more about purple now.

"Not Bule, it is Cyan" --- Sold

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Here is the other painting I did two days ago. Since I am in blue (as matter of fact, I am a little blue in mood lately), I want to talk more about this color called "cyan".

Many years ago when I was just into oil painting, I learned a little bit about color. I was told the red, yellow, and blue are primary colors; orange, green, and purple and secondary colors; red/green, orange/blue, and yellow/purple are complementary. You get grey if mixing the complementaries together. Now I find out this color model is so WRONG.  I can guarantee you will not get grey if you mix those "complementaries". In Munsell color wheel, there is no color orange. Now I use the computer HSV color system (similar to Munsell), The six base colors are red, yellow, green, cyan (or turquoise), blue, and magenta (or purple). You see orange is dropped, and cyan has been added in. These six colors are evenly distributed on the color wheel. In other words, each of the pizza slide of these six colors are equal in size (60 degrees in angle). If we use the old color system, the orange slide will be very narrow, only 30 degrees, while the blue slide will be very wide (120 degrees) if we think cyan belongs to blue. With the HSV system the complementary pairs are red/cyan, yellow/blue, and green/purple. Now you can make greys, not mud.

"The color of blue 4"

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Yesterday, I did two paintings. Here I just show one to you. I revisit the color blue (turquoise or cyan to be more accurate). Now I understood that I can't tint too much the tube color if I want to keep the chroma high. So this will limit my leverage of value change. Pthalo turquoise is very dark color, but I want to show lighter value, what should I do? With my first painting, I used analogous scheme, and high value background. It didn't work, because I have to tint the turquoise a lot. The color got bleached.  The second painting showing here works I think. I did two things. I made background darker, so the value of blue object does not need to be too high. Secondly, I used complementary color scheme to enhance the color contrast. Even the chroma is not very high (chroma = 79, (100 is the highest)), but the complementary scheme bushes it up.

Because I am concentrating on color scheme and harmony lately, I let the composition go. My painting may be too simple and not exciting artistically. This painting is very modern looking. But I am not crazy. I will win your confidence back.

"The color purple"

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The study is going. With this one I worked on the color purple. This one has some problems. I want the  purple color to be high in chroma, but it didn't happen. If I tint the color, the purple is very quickly lose its chroma (or intensity). I was using quinacridone magenta. Most of the purple colors are dark (low value) if you use them directly out of the tube. If you know a mid or light purple with intense chroma, please let me know. Thanks.

"Clear and Cool"

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My color design study has gained more momentum. In this painting my main color has shifted to ultramarine blue. The color scheme is still analogous. I want to stay with analogous scheme to guarantee the color harmony. I feel it is working. I will exercise more to become more skillful.

"The color of blue 2" --- Sold

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This my second try on doing a color design with blue. The color scheme is still analogous. I minimized the use of yellow. There are two blue I used: on the bottle I used phthalo turquoise, and on the background and the small cup I used ultramarine. My camera has a limitation. The turquoise color is not showing as strongly as the painting showing. I feel much better about this one.

I have to say I am doing a very left-brain dominated research right now. Each of the small painting I do recently is one data point for me. Song (my wife) is very concerned about me. This exercise may hurt my business (it is very scary). I have moved away from my usual style, and put on many restrictions on me deliberately. Many of you might have similar concerns just like Song does. Why are you doing this? Qiang must be crazy now. Well, my explanation is: what I am doing now just like a person want to learn ice skating. I know how to walk, but I deliberately put on those weird shoes with blades underneath. Now I can not walk. I even don't know how to stand. I have to start with baby steps. That is the hard time I am giving to myself now, because I know I will have more freedom in the future.

"The color of blue"

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I think I am giving myself a hard time. I force myself not to use red and orange colors for while, I want to see if I still can paint good paintings. My newly developed color analyzing tool has shown some use for me. The color scheme of the this one is majorly analogous and slightly complementary. The center of focus is obvious. The blue does stand out, but not strong enough. Now I need your help: how can I make this color scheme more exciting? Oh! I just got a thought, I am going to do a Daily Paintworks Challenge, so you can show me a couple of things. See you on DPW.

" At the hillside"

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I have been doing a serious study on color harmony for a week. It is one of most important topic in graphic design. In this painting I used the analogous color scheme. I am trying to develop a tool on my computer to analyze the color design of any arbitrary painting: I run a filter to get a simplified version of the original image (to mimic the effect of squinting). Then I sampled a set of colors and get  their corresponding hue, chroma, value figures. Then I map those colors on the color wheel, and the grey scale. From the distribution of the colors, I can know the painting's main color, color scheme, color dominance, value dominance, and value range. With this method, I can quantitatively understand the design of any artists including myself. Please see an example of my analysis. In the future, I will develop an app, you may put on iPhone or iPad. If you know someone doing the similar thing, please let me know. I might have reinvented the wheel.

"Green Go Red Stop"

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I am painting again. The time between this one and my last painting was about a week, so I am not qualified as an daily painter if I keep doing this. I did a lot of thinking lately. A couple of years ago, I don't think too much when I paint. "JUST DO IT" was my spirit. But nowadays, my art has reach to a bottle neck. I saw problems in my paintings. I can't stand when I see some of my old work. I am learning proactively, and feel overwhelmed. I must control my desire, and reluctantly pause something I really want to do (like figure drawing and painting). Now in still life, I have decided to do high key and colorful small paintings, and my dark background paintings for only large paintings. I also start to put away some of my general principles like "painting the light, not the object", and "use large area muted color to make the color at the focal point sing". I am working more on graphic design concepts, which I don't know enough about. I am trying new approaches, even approaches I don't have strong believe in. My today's painting is not my usual style. Someone may think I am going backward. No matter what, it is just an experiment.

"More thought about teaching art to children"

I did two children's art classes yesterday. This image is a drawing done by my son Jonathan (15 years old). Since my post of last week talking about teaching art to children, I have received many artists friends' comments and emails. Many of them provided me information of website links of art teaching projects. I want to thank all of you for supporting me and help me out. I have been googling and try to find appropriate projects that I can use to beef-up my curriculum. I am sorry to say I have rejected most of them from the Internet and ended up creating most of the projects by myself. Personally, I feel the current art education has over emphasized too much the importance of the Impressionism and the modern trend. So many projects online try to teach kids how Van Gogh and Warhol paints. I have not seen any project teaches how Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Bouguereau, and Sargent paints. For those artists, art education can only talk about them as a part of history lessons. I really believe this kind of representation art is teachable if the teacher arrange the projects properly. Those are the projects I would like to involve into my curriculum. I understood that most of children love to draw during their kindergarten, elementary, and part of the middle school. However most children conclude they can not draw when they are around 12 years or older. The reason is they see more and more around them, but feel frustrated with their art skills. So most people give it up. As a matter of fact, that is exactly the time, art teacher can really help.  I am happy to see many of my young students making progress.

You haven't seen much of my painting lately. Well there are many thing to talk about that. I will get back to you soon.

“Autumn Sweet"

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This week I was called back by my previous engineering company to work on a technical project. So I tried the old routine I had when I was working full time, i.e. working in the day and painting in the evening. So I painted this small painting last night, but I felt very different then before. Instead of concentrating on creating art, I was fighting to myself to keep going. I was so tired. My energy level was significantly lower then before. At many points, I almost gave it up. I just wanted to go to bed. I reluctant to accept that I am no longer a young man any more. To many of you my friends, I have no right complaining about aging. But I understood now that I am confronting the challenge of life itself. Oh boy! Getting old is not for sissies!

"Artists for our future"

I don't have a painting to show you, but I want to share what I am doing for this a couple of days. I have not mentioned much in my blog that I have art classes in my house, most of the students are children from 5 to 16 years old. In order to teach kids art properly, I did a lot of search on the Internet, but I was very disappointed to find out that there is almost nothing I can use to guide children to gain hands-on skills and knowledge about art. I asked some of my young friends in both elementary and high schools if they have art classes in school and what they have learned. They said they do have art, but they hardly learned anything. It is a sad reality that art education, in America as well as in China, schools only teach how to talk about art, not how to do it. I feel sorry to our kids, and I will try my best to help them.

I have some workshop openings

Finally the Texas heat is coming down. The cool autumn is coming. I will be busy teaching in this beautiful season. I have arranged quite a few workshops. some of them are quite full, but I still have a few opening for two workshops. One will be in Wethersfield Connecticut organized by Wethersfield Academy of Arts on October 24 -26. If you are in New England, or want to go there in this colorful foliage season, please contact Betty Standish to register. Another workshop will be at Magnolia near Houston Texas organized by ARLC on November 9 - 11. Please contact Marty Hatcher to sign up. I am looking forward to sharing my art with you. The photo I posted here was at Newport Rhode Island. I was doing my demo painting. My workshops do fill quickly. I wish you good luck.

"Demo at Jacksonville 2012 2" --- Sold

The workshop at Jacksonville is over now, and I am on my way back to Austin. I feel so blessed, and very grateful to so many people supporting my art. I hope I did not wear out too much of my workshop artists those three days. The information was overwhelming. Please make sure you review the notes and practice regularly. You will see the progress for sure.

"Demo at Jacksonville 2012 1" --- Sold

I am in Jacksonville FL now. This is what I did yesterday on my workshop. I want to thank Eileen Corse for putting this workshop together, and thank all artists from all over. This is my second trip to Florida this year. Travel has become a normal part of my life now. Hurricane Isaac is still pour down a lot of rain here. Yesterday was a busy day for me. Besides the workshop during the day, I did also a quick portrait for one of the artists. Now I am forming this quick blog post before my class starts for the second day.

"Peaceful"

It looks that my calligraphy/stilllife painting works well in small format (5x7). Now I want paint a little larger. I did this 9x12 yesterday. The character in this painting means "peaceful". Many Chinese characters can be decomposed into simpler characters, just like some English words have "prefix and suffix". For this one, the upper part means "a house" and the lower part means "woman". So "a woman in a house" means "peaceful". I guess the better interpretation should be: if you are in a family, you will have a peaceful life. In our modern life, traditional family life is out of fashion. We emphasize more on individuals. Maybe that is the reason we don't have much peace nowadays.

"On My Kitchen Counter" --- Sold

After my last post, I have received quite a few friends' comments and emails. Thank you so much. Your words warm my heart. AAU and figurative painting are dreams coming true to me. I had wonderful times, and gained useful skills and knowledges. However, I have also realized that I can't solve some of the problems in two hours, putting something down maybe harder than picking something up. But I need to be rational and practical. I really need to have my left brain cells kick in, and treat each of my paintings as a scientific project.

I have a workshop coming up soon. So I did this 9"x12" to warm up. I feel a little rusty and need some force to get the momentum going. I didn't give too much composition thought on this one. After my breakfast yesterday, I simply move our family fruit plate to my studio. I have vague ideas in my mind. From my still life with Chinese characters studies, I know I want to work on depicting abundance of things. I am going decrease the gap between still life and landscape paintings.

"Head Study 4 at AAU"

I have not painted for several days. To keep my blog going, I post a painting I did before. This head study I did at AAU. All my AAU paintings are 12" x 16" or larger. I can't sell them as my small still life studies. I really don't know how to market them. If you are interested in them, please contact me.

I didn't paint is because I am having a mental problem. I was like a drug addict with an obsession, I was so into figure drawing and couldn't stop doing it. You may have noticed if you read my previous post. It was not that I was so indulged into what I did, but I just couldn't stand the problems I had seen in my figure work. I thought I could fix that problem in two hours. However, the hours turned into days, and days became weeks, ... I was like a desperate gambler in front a slot machine, hoping the next quarter I put in it will bring me a good fortune. I was so frustrated. I ignore painting, ignore I have a business to run, ignore my family and I need to eat.  I need a life coach or a rehab to fix me up. Boy! I never thought that learning can be so harmful.

Now I force myself putting down my pencils (similar to a smoker putting down the cigarette). I understood (at least theoretically) that craving is a universal disease. It is the source of all suffering.

"Writing the Flower" --- Sold

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The character in my today's painting means "flower". It is in the "Cao" style of the calligraphy. This kind of writing has became a pure art form and it is so much deviated from everyday writing. I painted a rose to go with it.

These a couple of weeks after I came back from San Francisco, I spent most of my time trying to improve my figure work. On the foundation I established at AAU I worked on anatomy and human structure seriously, practiced with oil and charcoal. I am really trying to bring my figure work into a level so I can feel comfortable to show my figure paintings to the public. However, I have not reached the goal I want. The only conclusion I got so far is that the learning curve of the figure painting is MUCH longer than I thought. Keep improving is my only choice. Many people wrote to me: "Qiang, you are too hard on yourself, and you figure work is good enough". Well, to be honest with you, I don't think so.

You may have this kind of experience: you joined a local life drawing group, drawing (or painting) figure every week. Many years have passed, but you still doing almost the same, Hardly can tell the difference of the work of yesterday and of two years ago. One of the artist in the same group comes to you and told you that he has been drawing with the group for 35 years, but you look at his work. You see immediately what is wrong. The hand is too large, and the shoulder is not right. Even a 3-year old can see that. Then you take workshops from top notch artists, but very soon after, you will draw or paint the same way as before.... What I want to say here is: there is big problem of art practice, and there is a big problem of art learning. I also want to say: all of those problems are solvable, and it does not do anything with if we are talented or not.

“Sweet Moment" --- Sold

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I keep exploring the ways to involve the Chinese characters into my still life more naturally. Using a plate is not a bad idea.  The character in my today's painting means "sweet". So I painted whole bunch of grapes with it. As a matter of fact, painting abundance of something has been one of my goals in painting, which I have not fully achieved yet. I worked on leaves before, but I think I am not there yet. That is why I don't paint much landscapes. I can't handle so many leaves, rocks, clouds, and so on. I  really admire artists who can paint warehouses, libraries, and cityscapes. I can paint grapes in clusters ok, so I will be there after more practices.

"Simply Sweet" --- Sold

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Today I am working on a figurative project, one of those requires many days to finish. I think Zhaoming at AAU has opened a can of worms. He made me aware that so many things I don't know. He told us: when you paint a figure, you painting 80% from what you KNOW, and 20% from what you SEE. Human form is so subtle, underneath the smooth skin there is so much going on. For a still life painter like me, I paint almost 100% from what I SEE. That is why I am so slow when I paint a figure. I can get the job done from meticulously measuring and comparing without knowing enough human structure. That is a very inefficient way. Now I am work really hard to KNOW the bones and muscles.

Having talked about figure, Let's come back to still lives. The painting I posted today was done when I was at AAU. One day I was very tired of figure painting, I grabbed some props in the storage, and did this small painting. The calligraphy on the sake bottle gives me the idea of involving Chinese characters  into my paintings.