Nature as Art Objects

Painter Kwon strives to capture beautiful feelings from seeing nature

   
Painter Kwon Hee-yeon said her paintings try to show what beautiful feelings viewers might have after seeing nature, rather than painting nature realistically.
"A famous Chinese philosopher in the 4th century B.C. said nature made itself an object of beauty and a place to seek a lifetime of comfort,"Prof. Kwon of Sookmyung Women's University said. "At this juncture, the beauty of nature began to have been characters in expression and the characterization became nature and expressed in such a way."With such a background of thoughts, she gets away from a simple mechanical and aimless depiction of nature, but instead opts for a more detailed and extant nature itself in order to visualize the sensitivity and to express the circulating nature inside the sensitivity in an allegorical analysis.
In a broad sense for nature, a series of work on human beings describe the expressions of modern people tired from city life, their worries, depression, conflicts and cries for love.
   
The flows of color from a gray tone background to a bright lightness were an attempt to display hidden, hopeful expectations. The effort was due to her approach to depict whatever exists to catch the subject of questioning existence so that the circulation issue can be understood.
She said she began the 'Life Series'out of her interest for examining nature. Before putting brown sand at the bottom, her sense for beauty began to act and the paintings of nature she worked hard to paint already became separated from the original form, giving the power of a new life to the paintings.
The flowers in the paintings were done in a precise mix of colors, but the background that slides away shows tree silhouettes filling empty stems. The scene could be the look of a forest in the dawn, or a foggy day. It could also be a scene soon after rain stopped or a scene in the dusk shortly after sunset.
It is congratulating the nature and at the same time, the sense of the transience of life like a Chinese poem by Wang Yu.
When the flower is in bloom, it is a fresh congratulation by the gods, but it is death that people feel when it disappears. Kwon said her paintings are not meant to simply show flowers; rather they are close to igniting expectations for a flower in a certain space. They are always painted with the background of where they are located, not painted just to show flowers as they are.
Flowers and sceneries cannot be separated from their world, but co-exist all the time. She wants to show off plants and flowers related organically with nature.
Regarding her paintings in the "Nature Series,"Kwon observed that the world of plants is quiet and suspended, but describes its circulation with repeated flows to fill the gaps. She said her paintings of plants, or rather weeds, are made of several floors with weeds in bunches. Weeds in a single color make up a background, curtains or sceneries and they make a broad scenery, although they are not a detailed scene, the artist said.
She said she chose weeds because
they are lives that start from the lowest levels on the ground to depict the power of life stemming form growth activity in plants.
Painter said her work done so far were devoted to exploring the issue of circulation in a natural manner, not guided nor induced to make changes in expression of their contents., In forms of expression, she said she tried to let tradition continued and yet harmonize with modernity. In a nutshell, objects, the utilization of material and design techniques employed in her work cannot be said to be new ones, but she tried to breakaway and to point out the true direction, she said.
The make-up of the canvas, its background colors and depiction weren's done in traditional ink, technique and opaque colors, but her art form is based on colors, not relying on any one of those methods.
The painter said each of the series shows not much difference in expression methods, although different material and expression methods were employed.
Nature that appears in her work has been the subject of her experiment to see if allegorical interpretation of nature as images recreated was possible. She examined them to see if multiplicity and multidimensional mutual relations centered on the circulatory discipline that is created between them. Painter Kwon is a graduate of Sookmyung Women's University College of Arts in Seoul with Korean art major. She lives at Chungdam-dong, Samik Apt. 9dong, 1207ho, Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Her handset :017-718-2678. nw

1) Life: 165 x130cm: 1999
2) Life: 165 x130 cm: 1999
3) Life: 165 x130 cm: 1999
4) Painter Kwon Hee-yeon

5) Life: 60 x 60 cm: 2002
6) Life: 60 x 75 cm: 2004
7) Life: 60 x 75 cm: 2004
8) Life: 130 x 80 cm : 2005

9) Nature: 60 x 60 cm: 2007
10) Nature: 70 x 35 cm: 2007