THOUGHTS
I started landscape oil-painting when I was around 17 years old in Hong Kong, the place where I grew up. I began with copying landscape paintings from great european masters. In a sense, they were works of unprecedented, magnificent, remote natural landscape-sceneries.
It was until later when I went to Paris to study Architecture, that I finally had the opportunity to experience in realness those sceneries that I had tried so long to capture on my canvas. Several short stays in the rural environment of France and Switzerland which followed have proven to be very inspirational for me as well.
Through the photography I have found an efficient way to preserve an abundance of impressions from the observed natural sceneries, which are so rich in light grades and color nuances. I select the photos which fit best to the mood when the photos were taken and these photos become my painting templates.
At first glance, one who looks at my paintings tends to put my works in the category Photorealistic Paintings. My intention behind, however, is not to produce a one-to-one copy of the photo I have taken on my canvas, but rather to arouse the memory, emotions and feelings related to the scenery painted. In fact, when I paint, I want to re-experience over a much longer period of time, the same emotions and feelings I have had when I took the photos in the nature. I enjoy this process very much indeed.
It is important for me that a painting is an entire handicraft. The colors which have been put on the canvas surface by the artist using different techniques and brush strokes are, in my opinion, capable of intensifying the emotional effect of volume and texture, of distance and space, of light and shadow, of colors and its nuances, compared to the rather documentary photo image which I have begun with, in which the instance seems otherwise so extremely volatile.