Qiang Huang (pronounced Chong Wong) participates in the online Daily Painters Art Gallery and is listed on Jeff Hayes’ Painting a Day Squidoo lens, along with others involved in the increasingly popular practice of “painting a day”. He is also a member of a group called Plein Air Austin, which is dedicated to outdoor alla prima painting in Austin, Texas and the surrounding area.
Huang’s daily painting blog is largely dedicated to still life paintings. Where many daily painters will opt for small, single objects as the subject for these small daily studies, Huang works with more traditional still life arrangements of multiple objects.
His paintings feature bright, bold colors, a highly painterly approach with lots of visible brushstrokes and physical presence of the paint texture, and compositions with strong value contrasts.
Value is often underestimated as a quality in painting but Huang has made it a major component of his work. As an experiment, I converted a couple of his images to grayscale in Photoshop, effectively discarding the color information and leaving the image only in grays, and they read very well.
Huang has a demo video on the blog, from a demonstration he gave for the Plein Air Austin group, in which he worked on this still-life.
The demo is instructive even though it is set to an instrumental version of the Rascals’ Groovin’ rather than having an explanatory voice over. You can see, at least in this case, that he establishes his values with a low-chroma sketch before going in with his brighter colors.
The paintings on his blog are linked to nice big reproductions, close to or even larger on screen than original size; which I think is an excellent practice for a painter who is selling work directly online.
In addition to his blog, Huang also has a web site, with galleries of his more finished still life paintings, landscapes and portraits. His landscapes and portraits often use the illustrative approach of letting the edges of the image stay as rough, broad brush strokes that fade off into unpainted areas.
