丽色海棠 2020

This is 丽色海棠, or Chinese Flowering Crabapple, by 王新福, and it’s a veritable garden bursting with impasto marks of bright oil paint! I bet the painting itself was a battle, an endless addition of texture and color, a kind of wrestling match between the artist and the medium. I can imagine the artist moving around the canvas, reacting to the emerging forms with both deliberation and intuition. Did 王新福 layer up the colors, or mix them right on the canvas? Look at those marks of red and purple. So bold! I can almost feel the give and take, the push and pull, as the artist built up the surface, stroke by stroke. It makes me think about other artists who have approached the subject of flowers with this kind of bravado, like Joan Mitchell or even Van Gogh, all of us together in this ongoing conversation of paint, surface, and feeling. It's a reminder that painting is never a solitary act but part of a larger, ever-evolving exchange of vision and technique.