Artist Statement

yihali

I am an art student at Stony Brook University, and my major is studio art, focus is painting.

I was born in China. I liked drawing when I was young. I started drawing on the wall when I was in kindergarten. At first, my mother thought I was destroying the furniture, but the more she stopped me, the more I wanted to paint. My grandmother was very supportive about my early artistic creation, so she had a fight with my mom. After that, no one stopped me from drawing on the wall.

Before I went to college, I learned all my drawing skills from comic magazines, because I didn’t have time to learn painting. Chinese children are under a lot of study pressure. My parents didn’t want me to learn art at first. Instead, they paid more attention to my math. So I didn’t get much training. After entering the university, I learned more about my painting skills by myself, consulted professors and classmates around me, or copied some famous people’s works for reference to improve my painting skills. In my opinion, skill is very important, which is the basic skill of an artist. I always have a lot of novel ideas, but because of my poor painting skills, I cannot express the ideas in my mind correctly, so I often trapped by my ideas. I’m still working on my painting skills recently.

I paint with acrylic. In the past, my focus was more on natural landscape and the style of my works was more realistic. I pay more attention to the relaxation and happiness brought by the works. I want them to be beautiful and full of fantasy. But these days I tend to paint abstract images of cities. Some of these city scenes are magnificent, others are shabby. As my understanding of art grew, I felt that what I painted should have meaning, not just beautiful scenery. I chose to paint the city in my mind in an abstract way, so my painting looks more like a vague memory. Each painting is like a place that has been walked, some is a dream scene.I no longer pursue the small details in the painting, but pay more attention to the overall feeling of the picture, which is closer to the memory and imagination.