2016 was a quiet art year for me with lots going on in life. The first half of the year started out normally, working on different paintings and exploring new themes, but things changed in late spring. I found myself thinking a lot about motherhood, and what it meant as an artist to also be a mother. It’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about these past few years. I asked myself how I could explore this in my art, where I’ve often looked at female roles. Going back to my interest in themes and images repeated throughout art history, I was drawn to representations of the Madonna. Identifying her as the Virgin Mary was dependent on her being a mother or else her virginity would be of no importance. So who was this woman that was depicted in countless paintings with her baby if the baby was taken out of the picture.

And so I began playing with images of the Madonna with child, deleting everything except her face and shroud. I rearranged the separate parts to create a new composition. I played with textures where her halo should be and colour gradients and lines replaced golden rays of light.

While I was working on this painting and my brain was obsessed with these ideas, I learned that I was pregnant. And then it all made sense why this overwhelming feeling to work on this painting seemed to take over my mind. But it also meant that while I was planning a series of these paintings, my time in the studio changed. I had to reacquaint myself with the basics of oil painting, as I used techniques that were reliant on solvents, which were now forbidden to use. And my paintings took longer, and I had much less energy. This was also when I was preparing to leave for Salzburg. So my Madonna painting was only finished upon my return, later in the fall, once I was feeling better and able to spend more hours in the studio again. I’ve only created the one from a planned series, but I hope to revisit this in the future.

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Mother – Part 2

In the past, I’ve tried to create one self-portrait annually. There’s something very cathartic about painting these self-portraits. They are challenging, as who else’s likeness am I most familiar with? With any feature a millimetre off, it can change the complete look of a face. But I also really enjoy creating self-portraits, as I feel like they are just for me without worrying about what the painting means, if someone would want to buy it, or where does it fit within my practice. Many times, these paintings have marked important events in my life, however small or large they may seem to the outside world. There is a significance there for me. Sometimes they are more about feelings I was having, or my psychological state during that year. And other times they mark actual events. But more often than not, they are a mix of all these things, and also a way for me to work out new ideas and themes for future works in the backgrounds or style that I’ve chosen for each specific painting.

With my growing belly, I realized that I did not have many photos of myself pregnant, and it was something that I wanted to remember. As a child, I remember looking at photos of my mom when she was pregnant with me and how bewildering it was to think that I was once inside her. And I hope to be able to share this painting with my child someday.

I knew I wanted to work with an odd sized wood panel, one that I could use to emphasize the feeling of constraint. As I was physically growing in size, I imagined the tight quarters of my belly, but I also felt like I was being physically, mentally and emotionally stretched to extremes that I had never known. As with all my paintings, I think a lot about composition and space within the frame of the painting. A lot can be conveyed through the intentional use of space.

I also wanted this painting to be a celebration, hence the brightly coloured background and exploding flowers for my spring baby. This was the first time that I worked on a self-portrait with the flat, graphic patterns of my other paintings.

I finished this painting just in time, before I take a few months off once my baby is born. So things may be a little quiet on the art front for a little while, but I’m hoping to get back into things by summer and be back in the studio and also working from home on some new projects. In the meantime, I will be exhibiting a couple of drawings from my pretty boys kill me series and a wallpaper installation in superyoung, a group exhibition curated by Zoë Chan at the Kamloops Art Gallery. The exhibition will run from April until July.

I’m back from my stay in Salzburg, Austria, where I was at the Summer Academy for three weeks. Each residency experience I’ve had has been unique, and this time abroad was no different. For all the positive things about being away in a new environment to create art, without the distractions of daily life at home, there are also things that I’ve found hard about doing residencies. Maybe it’s the lack of familiarity of daily life, and having to navigate a new city in such a short amount of time, where you are still a tourist but need to function and work day to day as well. There is also a sense of isolation that can be inherent in residencies.

Salzburg is a small city, but while I was there, it also coincided with the Salzburg Festival, one of the largest classical music festivals in the world, and a few days after my arrival, the city was teeming with tourists. The Summer Academy is also located in the Festung Hohensalzburg, one of the main tourist attractions that sits high above the city. Every morning I would have to cram into a packed funicular to go up the steep hill to my studio in the walls of the fortress.

The site of the Summer Academy offered spectacular views of the city and its surrounding mountains, but it also was up on the top of a very steep hill that was in the middle of a large tourist attraction. And the summer tourist season was in full swing while I was there. I was struck by the sheer number of tourists in such a small city, of the bus loads of people going on The Sound of Music tours, women around walking in traditional dirndl dresses, and families being taken around in horse drawn carriages every ten minutes. It was slightly surreal.

My time in the studio was spent mainly working from life models – we had two models that worked with us for the entire day, for three weeks straight. When I first applied for the Summer Academy, I was unsure what the structure of the studio time was going to be. It was described as a course about life painting, but also sounded like a residency with free time to pursue your own projects. When I arrived, there was a mix of artists there, from complete beginners to professional artists, and while this was interesting in some respects, it was also frustrating in others. The model poses were often too short for me to paint from, as I had brought my oil paints with me, and many of the more inexperienced artists rushed through their paintings well under an hour and wanted to move onto the next pose.

So I spent the first week or so, working on quick sketches, to loosen up my hand and get back into drawing from the nude body. But this grew tiresome, as I did not want to continue this for the entire time I was there. I thought back to previous self-directed residencies I have been on and decided to treat this the same way, and to try to find something about where I was, in this new environment, that I could work from.

And that’s when I thought about actually being in Salzburg, and my experience of it, in the height of summer. The Sound of Music is not very popular with Austrians, but there were so many large tour groups of foreigners, including sing-along bus tours, that took people to see where they filmed the movie. And tourists dressed up in dirndl and lederhosen wandering the streets, mixing with locals dressed up in fancier versions out at the opera. It is a bit hard for me to imagine what the city is like without all the tourists, as I imagine it is much more tranquil and quiet, surrounded by the green mountains in all directions. The other thing I noticed about Salzburg, and many other cities in Europe, is the colour of the buildings. Unlike in North America, where you get houses and buildings in every colour, it seemed like a very restrained palette of pastel peaches, creams and yellows in Salzburg. And of course, the main reason I was in Austria was to be at the Summer Academy, working from the life models, and with the short time frames available for me to work from, I decided to focus solely on the arms of the model.

And so I created these oil paintings, drawing from the mountains I could see out in the distance, wrapped in the colours of Salzburg, where “the hills are alive”. I worked on primed linen that I had brought with me, and I intend on mounting them onto board now that I’m back in Vancouver. I haven’t decided on the background yet but I don’t think I will leave them white. A flat colour perhaps. The work is still unfinished. Working in oils can be limiting, as I’ve learned from past residencies, I need to leave enough time for the paint to dry so that I can take the work back with me without damaging the surface. And in the end, I felt good about the work that I created, and that it can lead to further explorations here in Vancouver.

I imagine this is probably the same in most cities: having to move artist studios every few years.

I’ve moved studios every couple of years, and each time it doesn’t get any easier. Sometimes I moved because a shared studio space wasn’t working out anymore, other times because the studio was going to get torn down for new developments. And each time there’s a certain amount of stress of trying to find a new fit, followed by the actual act of moving all of my art work and supplies.

The new studio search can feel like I have all my art belongings in my arms and I’m wandering the city to find it a new home. This past December I  was lucky to move to Gene Studios, which is part of an artist community in the Mount Pleasant area of Vancouver.

Next Friday, I will be taking part in ROVE, an art walk through Mount Pleasant that takes visitors through 8 different art spaces open for one night to the public. From 6 to 10 pm, people can visit different galleries and artist studios.  Gene Studios houses many different studios, so come say hi while you check out all the different artists here.

Late last fall, I made a quick trip to New York and was lucky enough to visit the new Whitney Museum and catch Frank Stella’s retrospective. I’ve only seen some of his paintings in group shows, but this was a retrospective of his work and I was awestruck by the scale of some of his sculptural works.

Here was an artist that I never really gave too much thought to in relation to my own work, but at this show, it suddenly hit me that our paintings share visual and conceptual similarities. And while I liked seeing his paintings, it was the 3D works that really caught my imagination. It was just the creative boost I needed, and I rushed back into the studio to work out new ideas. Which was perfect timing, as I moved into a new studio in December. I am now in the Mount Pleasant area of East Vancouver working amongst a talented group of women artists including Sunshine Frere, Rebecca Chaperon, Biliana Velkova and Mira Song.

Meanwhile, over in Calgary, Mary Porter and my collaborative project, A Conversation, was getting its second showing of the year. Shown in a new format on two opposing monitors, A Conversation was displayed in TRUCK Gallery’s +15 Windows in December and January.

My limited edition screen print, The Drought, that was created for The New Gallery in Calgary also sold during their fundraiser. I have a limited number of prints available for sale, so if you are interested please contact me.

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I’ve been busy in the studio, quietly working away on new paintings. I thought it would be fun to show some work-in-progress shots alongside the final works. I often post photos of the painting process on Instagram but some of the rougher early stuff I like to keep to myself as a record of what I’ve done. I’ve mostly been in the studio working on new ideas, trying not to repeat myself in my painting and seeing where I can go with my art.

Beyond the Realm of Failure was originally intended for a large scale mural in downtown Vancouver at the L’Occitane flagship store, but it didn’t work out and they ended up going a different route. I wrote about this on my blog a couple of years ago – you can read about it here.

I really liked my original sketch and idea and didn’t want to see it forgotten on my computer somewhere, so I reworked the image to incorporate more of my own ideas, textures and patterns. I also wanted to experiment with actual collage of shapes cut from linen. My paintings are often mistaken for collage, but it’s all hand painted.

Along with using different textures and materials, I’ve also been playing with looser inky areas of paint. I worked and re-worked this painting, on and off for about a year, and I finally reached the point where I believe it’s finished. I still feel a bit iffy about it sometimes. When I look at it for too long I feel like I can pick out problems with it. But then when I’ve put it away for a while and take it back out to look at it with refreshed eyes, I can also appreciate those same “problem” areas.

February was also the start of the Chinese New Year. 2016 is the Year of the Monkey, which also happens to be my zodiac sign. I’ve been working on ideas around horoscopes and zodiacs for a while now, but no big project has come of this yet. This idea came to me suddenly one day and I had to draw it out. I feverishly finished it in two days, just before my self-imposed deadline of Chinese New Year.

And lastly, I just finished a new painting that I feel brings together many of my past ideas and is also evolving in a new direction. I’ll have to let it sit on the wall and breathe a little before I look at it again and think about where to go next.

I’ll be taking part in ROVE, an art walk through Mount Pleasant, and my studio will be open to the public the evening of May 27th. I’ll post more details in the upcoming weeks. I haven’t had an open studio for a few years, since I took part in the Eastside Culture Crawl. This will be a good opportunity to come see my work space and my new drawings and paintings, and I will also have prints for sale. I’ll post when I have more information on that soon. In the meantime, if you’d like to receive news and updates from me in your inbox, you can sign up for my mailing list.

It’s been a quiet few months on my blog, but things have been busy this summer. Between exhibitions in Vancouver and Edmonton, there have been travels as well as dressmaking and a wedding! I’ve just recently started a new painting in the studio, and with the sudden change in weather here in Vancouver, I’m reminded of that back to school feeling. So I guess you can kind of think of this blog post as my first day back to school, and here’s what I did this summer.

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Now & Then – Pendulum Gallery, Vancouver

The group exhibition, Now & Then, at Pendulum Gallery was well received, with their new gallery walls and light system in place. It’s a great place to show work as I think it receives more foot traffic than many galleries I’ve shown at, and the more eyes, the better.

You can read more about the exhibition and gallery space in Vancouver is Awesome here.

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A Conversation: With Mary Porter – Latitude 53, Edmonton

For the last year and a half, Mary Porter and I have been collaborating on a project. We’ve known each other for almost 15 years now, meeting when we were both on exchange in Paris. Over those 15 years we have perhaps only lived in the same city for 12 months total. But we’ve managed to keep in touch and stay good friends, as well as collaborate on smaller projects on and off over the years. This culminated in our project, A Conversation, which we showed this summer at Latitude 53’s ProjEx Room.

Working from images found through Google Image Search, Mary and I made digital collages based on our text conversation using the first 20 images for each search. The results were convoluted but patterns emerged through common images and text. We showed the images as a video projection on opposite walls in the space, where viewers sat in the middle as we “spoke” to each other from either side of the room.

A Conversation will be showing in December at Truck Gallery’s Window Space in Calgary, Alberta.

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A Wedding & A Honeymoon

Last but not least, my fiancé and I got married this summer. Early on in the planning stages, I saw a dress I loved but it was from a few years back and impossible to get a hold of, not to mention way out of my budget. Against my better judgment (or despite it!), I decided I was going to make my own wedding gown, even though the last time I sewed a dress was when I was 14 and in Home Ec class. I figured…how hard can it be? It was just another art project to tackle! The thing is, I wanted a simple shaped dress, which I had a hard time finding in shops, but I also wanted flowers on it. So I got down to painting with watercolours, practicing roses in a painting medium that I wasn’t used to. After many botched attempts, I finally worked it out and scanned the image and had it printed onto satin.

From there, I made a mock up dress in a cheap fabric using my own pattern that I created by looking at photos online of the original dress I liked and, no joke, Gwyneth Paltrow’s pink dress that she won her Oscar in. I think all my problem solving skills for creating art, from the planning stages to the end results, helped me a lot in trying to figure out my dress.

Working on my kitchen table at home while trying to keep the dress a secret was hard, and it also meant doing fittings and trying to see what the dress looked like on and from behind meant many awkward selfies in the mirror. In the end, after a couple of fitting hiccups, I finished the dress and even made it convertible into a shorter party dress for the reception.

The wedding couldn’t have been more perfect. And after a happily stress-free wedding, my husband and I left for a quick honeymoon in California. We spent a few days in Ojai, and all the cacti we saw inspired my new work, which has been commissioned by The New Gallery in Calgary for their fundraiser later this fall. The drawing will be made into a silkscreen print. I will post more details in upcoming months.

In the meantime, a little sneak peek:

I’ve been waiting to show these drawings for about a year now. I first began this series of piggy drawings in late 2013 and continued into last year. I was originally going to exhibit them last year at Pendulum Gallery, but due to construction, the exhibition dates kept getting pushed back. I’m very happy to say that the show Now & Then will be opening next week.

These little piggy drawings are very special to me, as they’ve helped me deal with my grandmother’s dementia. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in late 2011, and it has been very difficult watching her illness progress. I wanted to do something that both honored my grandmother and also touched on the situation.

Growing up, I was always very close to my grandparents, and I was especially close to my grandmother. She always had an eclectic mix of knick knacks that she’d pick up from garage sales, flea markets and her little adventures she would take around the city. She was and still is a fiercely independent woman. But it wasn’t until she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s that I looked at all the figurines collected on the shelves of her wall and only then did I realize she had a huge collection of pig figurines. And she told me that over the years, she was always searching carefully to add to her collection. She displayed them neatly, grouped together on shelves and in display cases.

With the onset of her dementia, my grandmother felt a need to collect things and had begun to hoard. She had become obsessive. And it was at this time that I began working with my grandmother’s carefully curated collection of ceramic pigs and piggy banks. Her collection of pigs was assembled when collecting was still for pleasure. Through this drawing project, I now appreciate my grandmother’s selectiveness and curation of these trinkets. Something I didn’t realize or pay attention to when I was younger and wrote off as my kooky grandmother doing what grandmothers do. But she had her own purpose.

This work follows my on-going examination of memory and personal histories. Aside from their decorative purposes, the ceramic pigs, which included piggy banks and other piggy containers, also serve a practical means of collecting and storing things. Stacking the pigs up on each other, they precariously teeter and are on the edge of falling and breaking, rendered useless.

We collect memories throughout our lives, only to slowly lose them in the end.

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I’ll be exhibiting these piggy drawings along with some paintings from my recent series Of Myth and Men, as well as never shown before drawings from my Rejected Memories series. The exhibition, Now & Then, will open next week at Pendulum Gallery in Vancouver. More details can be found here.

Now & Then revisits some of the highlights of Pendulum Gallery exhibitions from the past decade, marking a point at which then becomes the now and acknowledging the intersection between the gallery and a select number of artists. The show is structured as a series of five small overviews, and through the presentation of both newer and older works, it attempts to give a sense of each artists’ practice, allowing the viewer to appreciate developing themes and methodologies.

I will be exhibiting alongside Ross Kelly, Ewan McNeil, David Marshall and Bettina Matzkuhn.

Things have been a bit quiet. I had to take some time off in March and only just got back into the studio this past week. I’ve been busy preparing for a couple of group exhibitions in May in Vancouver. But first, I wanted to share some preliminary drawings I’ve been working on. These are only sketches that I will be using to create the final piece(s). It is a slow process. Oftentimes when we see artworks, we don’t realize all the work that goes into the preparation. All the sketches, set up, failed attempts and do overs. We only see the final product that the artist is allowing us to see.

Here is a sneak peek of some drawings. Works in progress…

This is part two of my photo diary of my last trip of 2014 – around the world in three weeks. After the last leg of our trip in Prague, we flew, via Paris, to Tokyo. I haven’t been back to Asia in over 10 years, and I haven’t been to Japan since my early teens. This was definitely the favourite part of my world trip. We didn’t nearly have enough time to see everything, and I definitely hope to be back soon to spend more time exploring the country. Here are some photos from my short but memorable trip to Japan.

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Part 5 – Tokyo, Japan

We arrived in Japan just in time to catch the tail end of their Autumn Colour festival, with beautiful leaves changing colour around the city, even though it was already mid-December. Tokyo is a huge city and we barely scratched the surface on our too brief trip.

From Tokyo, we hopped on a bullet train and headed to Kyoto for the last leg of our trip. We travelled at dizzying speeds…

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Part 6 – Kyoto, Japan

Once we got to Kyoto, we headed straight for Arashiyama, as we had luckily timed our arrival with the start of their light festival. The bridges, streets and hills were all lit up, with lanterns lighting the path way to the temples and through the bamboo forest. This last part of our trip was definitely dedicated to seeing temples and gardens.

And there you have it. We traveled 3 different continents, 5 different countries, 6 different cities, in a little over 3 weeks (a couple of days were spent flying). It was truly the trip of a lifetime, and it was daunting when we first booked it and thought about how many places we were going to in such a short time. But once we were actually traveling, I think our excitement overrode our jet lag and we were usually out from morning to night, walking all day long. I saw and experienced so many new things, I’ve collected lots of ideas along the way and am keeping them the sketchbook in my head for future works. It will be interesting to see how things I saw from this trip will find their way into my future art.

For more pictures from my trip, you can check out my Instagram.

]]> 2840 http://roselinahung.com/blog/around-the-world-in-21-days-part-one/ Fri, 16 Jan 2015 21:28:30 +0000 http://roselinahung.com/blog/?p=2799

Happy New Year! It’s hard to believe that it’s already 2015. You may have noticed it got a little quiet toward the end of last year on my blog. I ended the year on a big whirlwind trip around the world…in 21 days. Earlier last spring, an amazing (unbelievable!) flight deal came up that my fiancé and I couldn’t turn down. So late November, we embarked on a once in a life time trip that saw us fly from Vancouver to New York and then on to Milan. From there, we trained to Vienna and Prague. And then flew to Tokyo, took a bullet train to Kyoto and then flew home to Vancouver. We did this all in 3 weeks!

We spent about 3 days in each city and because we had so little time in each place, we tended to focus on certain aspects of the cities each day. Because there was really so much to do and I could talk forever about everything we saw and did, I think it’s better to do another one of my photo diaries with a random collection of images. So here is a sampling of my trip…

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Part 1 – New York

This was my first time to New York during the Thanksgiving/Christmas season. I also got to experience the madness of Black Friday first hand. While a lot of museums and galleries were closed, we did get to catch a few shows in Chelsea. Making the most of being in the city during Thanksgiving, we went to see the Macy’s parade and walked by all the fancy Christmas windows at the department stores. I felt like the entire city was glittering.

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Part 2 – Milan, Italy

We spent most of our time in Milan wandering the streets, popping into different churches and shops, and just enjoying the city. One of the highlights was seeing Da Vinci’s The Last Supper…no photos of that allowed, but I was amazed by the sheer size of it. Much larger than I expected, at about 25 feet high by 29 feet across.

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Part 3 – Vienna, Austria

I was really looking forward to this part of the trip because I wanted to see all the different Klimt and Schiele paintings. My favourite was the Beethoven Frieze by Klimt at the Secession Building. We spent every day museum hopping and kinderpunsch drinking at Christmas markets. An excellent way to spend chilly days.

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Part 4 – Prague, Czech Republic

We took the train from Vienna and after the last week and a half of rushing around, we decided to take it easy in Prague. We had four days to wander the streets and take a bit of a breather. The city was packed with tourists, so we spend a lot of time winding down side streets and along the river in this picturesque city.

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With the European leg of our trip wrapped up, we flew via Paris to Tokyo. This post is getting a bit image heavy, so I’m going to leave our Japanese adventure for the next blog post, which I’ll put up in the couple of days.

For those of you who follow me on Instagram, you may have seen a recent influx of cat drawings pop up on my feed. I was working on a piece that will be printed in the upcoming Cat Issue of Sad Mag, a quar­terly mag­a­zine that cel­e­brates indepen­dent art and cul­ture in Vancouver.

The issue won’t be out until end of December, at the earliest, but I’m also releasing the image as an open edition print. The idea for this work actually started along the same lines as my pretty boys kill me series, while I was at Ox-Bow. I came across some patterned fabric and made a mock up using a scan and some digitally overlaid text.

This file sat on my computer desktop in a Work in Progress folder, tentatively titled “Cat Scan”. And it sat there on the back burner for a few years until the perfect opportunity to have it in Sad Mag came up. And so I began working on my version, using my own drawings. The image is a digital collage made up of my original pencil crayon drawings. I had an open call for friend’s photos of past pet cats.

i still dream about you (cats) is like my pretty boys kill me patterned text drawings, in that it is also like a love letter and deals with love and obsession, but between a pet owner and his/her cat. Speaking from experience, for cat owners (and probably any pet owner), after a pet passes away, every so often, it will show up in your dreams and there is a hint of sadness when you wake up. Sometimes I think about getting another cat, but then I think about the heartache of losing a pet. Someday….

And for anyone who hasn’t owned a cat before, well, the image can propagate the idea of the “crazy cat lady”.

I’m taking orders for this print, which is a signed open edition archival digital print. It is an 8″x10″ image on 8.5″x11″ inch archival watercolour paper. The print is $50 (plus shipping) and for all orders until the end of the year, I will be donating $5 from each print to the BC SPCA.

To order, you can e-mail me or place your order on the Editions page of my website. Delivery will be around December 20th. Also, Sad Mag will be selling these prints at the upcoming Blim Markets: November 23 at the Heritage Hall and December 20 at Fox Cabaret.