古镇奇缘 2015

王新福 painted this, “古镇奇缘”, with a palette knife, swirling blues, yellows, oranges and blacks on a surface. Imagine him standing before the canvas, loading the knife with paint, and applying it in thick, deliberate strokes, each one building up this evocative image. There’s something about the sheer physicality of this painting that just gets me. It is a dance of color and texture; the paint is not just on the canvas, it’s alive. You can almost feel the energy of the artist as they worked, pushing and pulling the paint around to capture a moment, a feeling, a memory. Maybe it's the memory of a busy marketplace. I see the influence of Soutine here, that urgency and that beautiful, clumsy way of rendering form. It’s like Wang is digging into the very substance of the world to find his image, and it reminds me that painting is about embracing the messy, the uncertain, and the unresolved. That’s where the magic happens.