老男人 2017

This is an undated painting called 老男人 by 王新福, and it looks like it's made with a whole lotta paint. It's cool how the artist uses really thick strokes, almost like frosting, to build up the image. You can really see the process, the way the paint is layered and swirled around. The texture is super important here, right? The artist uses the physicality of the paint to create a sense of depth and movement. Like, check out the way the blues and whites kind of crash around the figure. And how that brown and red on the figure almost looks like hewn wood. There’s this one spot right in the middle, a glob of white, where the painter didn’t quite blend it in. It looks like a scar. It reminds me a bit of Guston, but with a Chinese folk twist. Like Guston, 王新福 embraces the messiness of paint and leaves room for interpretation. It's like the painting is constantly shifting, never quite settling into one fixed meaning.