1999 Art Competition [Landscape] First Place— Xiaogang Zhu
"If you have a good photo of a beautiful scene, it's easy to copy, but then you lose yourself," Xiaogang Zhu says. “You can become slick, smooth and tight, and the painting becomes meaningless. A photo can be beautiful, because the scene is beautiful, but as an artist I have to avoid being too literal. I work with color and atmosphere; I emphasize contrasts, for example, a blue roof and its orange-red complement, as I did in Harbor Morning (below)."
The subject was a familiar one to the Shelton, Washington, artist—a harbor on San Juan Island. “The light was extraordinary because the sun had to break through haze. Sunlight going through moisture made the colors of the harbor heavier and brighter, more red and more orange—intense at first sight." To depict filtered light off a milky sea, he started with thin washes then built up the surface with more painterly applications of gouache.
Though photographs are usually "flat and dull," the artist used a reference photo to correct his memory. "There were lots of things going on and the only thing I took out was an Esso sign on a gas pump,” he says. "To pull it all together—without being too literal—that was the challenge."
The Artist's Magazine [December 1999]
