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MENG YANG
The Night 2 Pen on Canvas 55” x 79”
Meng Yang has chosen as a tool one of the most
indispensable building blocks in the visual arts—the
straight line—to create complex and powerfully stunning
images. She composes her work with lines that she
entwines and overlaps to produce her imagery, and her
choice of using ink on canvas generates an effect that
can be equated with the look of woven artwork. Meng has
observed that in both art as well as science, the line is one
of the most vital and irreducible forms, and in personalizing
this most rudimentary element, she is able to reestablish
her love of the rich tradition of Chinese nature painting. Her
subject matter varies—she at times presents floral imagery,
or images from daily life, or she creates fragmentary
abstractions that are reflections of her inner life. The modern,
ironic aspect to her work is that she uses a network of highly
detailed lines and a very structured composition to create
time-honored images which have, as their subject matter,
sublime visions of nature. Meng has come full circle in her
growth as an artist. She is revisiting traditional imagery, but
she is creating it in her own idiosyncratic way. While Meng
Yang’s art is personal, it also touches the viewer with its
power and its inspiring beauty.
Website: www.Art-Mine.com/ArtistPage/Meng_Yang.aspx
Jim Lively combines traditional portraiture with cuttingedge
design and avant-garde composition in his
provocative and engaging paintings. His primarily female
subjects are often shown in an abstract or semi-abstract
realm, but one that still feels rooted in contemporary
technology, surrounded as they are with bandwidth color
patterns, rows of numbers and text, pixilation and chilly
cityscapes. Never truly integrated into these ultramodern
environments, Jim’s sirens nevertheless maintain their
faith in the familiar blank stare of advertising, that mix of
invitation and challenge which is used to sell everything
from sex to soft drinks. Yet these icons seem alienated
and vaguely lost, transported as they are to a realm where
their environment of prefab colors and jagged shapes
highlight the unreality of their advertising-borne gaze and
by extension, the promises behind the ads. The anxiety
wrought by contemporary media is a major subject of these
works, especially the concern of feeling alienated from one’s
own culture and its expectations. Like an embarrassment
of conspicuous riches, the composition at times seems to
overwhelm Jim’s subjects, even occasionaly threatening
to literally strangle or swallow them. To be sure, these are
sirens sweetly singing, but our enjoyment of them, usually
unhampered by self-reflection, has been mediated by Jim
Lively’s dramatic and satirical imagery.
In Tuned Acrylic 24” x 36”
JIM LIVELY
Websites: www.jimlivelyart.com
www.Art-Mine.com/ArtistPage/Jim_Lively.aspx
37 ArtisSpectrum