Jove Wang was born in China and educated at the finest art institutes in the country. His paintings are rich and thick, skillfully painted with bold color and a masterful application of paint.
All of his paintings have a beautiful clarity to the atmosphere, brought on by the purity of color and fresh, loose, brushstrokes. Wang pushes the extremes of vivid color, finding the brightest, purest tones and allowing them to sing on the canvas.
In Village Children, he’s prominently used two brilliant primaries, blue and red, but balanced them with liberal fields of white and a wall of neutral browns.
Dark black shadows and pure white shoes emphasize the day’s brightness with beautifully contrasting values. The composition is fantastic as well; both natural-looking and yet perfectly composed.
Positive and negative space is evenly distributed, diagonal lines lead directly to the children’s faces, and the child in blue is perfectly centered to attract and keep the viewers’ attention.
Jove Wang uses the physical property of the paint in many of his paintings like a sculptor would, by creating planes and angles with broad strokes of a brush.
Portrait of Bill gives a great example of how he’s done that.
The angles of the forehead, temple, cheek, and beard have all been created with sure strokes of paint, each one using a slightly different hue and intensity of color to correctly capture how the light reflects differently off of each plane.
SEE MORE: Figures and portraits in oil at NUMA Gallery
A touch of red fringes the subject’s head on the left side, creating contrast with the cooler shadows of the forehead and pushing the background back. Conversely, a field of black in the upper right corner keeps the contrast from becoming too great between the figure’s dark hair and the white field of color.
Those touches are effortless examples of a master’s skill – and I’m inspired every time I see his paintings to let color flow in my own work, rather than restrict it.
For more information about Jove Wang, visit JoveWang.com.
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