Zhao Yanfeng
“I am searching and trying my utmost to make the colors in the picture transparent, and the colors to link up naturally. I used up a lot of time to paint, to find colors that came out of my imagination, and then I reject them one by one. Sometimes the colors emerge and I don’t capture it, and the repeated attempts thereafter throws me into the air, and then again and again I fall…”
November 13, 2012
“Whenever I face a blank canvas, the first thing I feel is to be at my wit’s end. I will drink tea, I am anxious, I pace, and image after image pop into my head, and then I reject them; if I don’t have an idea then I just put down the brush, so I can start communicating with my picture. Everything is unexpected, until it helps you enter a state full of light and colors and is unequalled comfort.
When I was painting that red painting I was trying my utmost to find a different kind of red. It needs unity and rhythm, to be full yet transparent. I used different sized brushes looking for it. This seemingly simple image is sometimes a few days’ work. The one today is drying very slowly because of water logging caused by the number of paintings, so I dabbed the water away with paper napkins, but the surface is disturbed because I did it too hard, and the color underneath was revealed with unexpected result. It was revealed naturally, it is so comfortable to look at. I found my identity within the image; it has unexpectedly taken the place of what I was searching for, or perhaps it is exactly what I was searching for. Sometimes you grow along with your painting, step by step, in dialogue. I will call this painting “Incomplete.”
June 26, 2014