Painter Ahn’s Passion for Trees

Trees, forests are places of comfort for tired souls and people with unfulfilled dreams

Painter Ahn Mal-hwan uses diverse materials to paint complex trees in condensed and impressive ways. Colors are simple and lines are indented with a knife, making tree branches look very interesting.
Surrounding landscapes are not seen with trees standing alone, sometimes bunched up together, and their bodies contain many things.
One can see that the painter's effort to try to show the original nature of trees, which gives virtue to humans recalling memories of past lives and tracts of time and gives form by sorting out the branches by moving them to her canvases one by one.
The paradise that lives in our fantasies is represented by trees, grass and flowers. So images with trees as subjects are ideal native towns that fill the empty spaces in human lives.
Ahn borrows from images of trees and forests to express rapture, anger, love and pleasure, with a desire to be in a forest-like paradise, which will become the original nature of love. She wants to take care of thirsts and of dreams through human relations formed with a mind-to-mind link, like a warm forest built through dialogues among the trees.
The painter invited trees into her canvases as she works to recall her artistic career with trees and causes entangled with the wind and the sun.
"An afternoon in New York when the winter is not yet over and Central Park is overflowing with warm sunbeams," the painter says in her note recalling her days in the Big Apple.
She says she suddenly moved further into the forest with the idea of her paintings after looking at shining tree leaves, reflecting sunbeams.
"Why am I moving? Am I looking for a place of rest? As I look around, many trees are head to head, embracing one another, offering large shadows. They whisper stories about the people who passed by them: love, happiness and sorrow -- I make sketches fast listening to their dialogues." She says she would like to invite the modern people to her forest, which is formed through the dialogues of trees, especially the people she knows who are tired of just living with unsatisfied conflicts, unresolved angers, pressures not seen for survival -- the sad and false boards of the lives of modern people.

"I wish they would find solace in paradise-like forests, where they can recover the original nature of love and resolve all the thirsts of unrealized dreams and minds can assemble and make up human relations," she says.
"Today, too. I paint forests with trees steadily." Ahn is a graduate of Seoul National University Fine Arts College. She has held 15 solo exhibitions of her artwork so far.
The latest exhibitions of her paintings took place at the invitation of Soo Gallery, Sejong Gallery and Jang Eun-sun Gallery in Seoul this year.
She has also displayed her art at Samsung Plaza Gallery and the Art Gallery of the Sejong Center of Performing Arts in 2002.
She has participated in 17 art fairs, the latest one being the 2008 Beijing Olympics Art Festival in Beijing and the KIAF International Art Fair at COEX Pacific Hall at the invitation of Na Gallery this year. She also displayed her paintings at the New York Art Festival in 2007. nw

(from top) Painter Ahn Mal-hwan

Tree-Dialogue: 41x82 cm: Mixed Media: 2008

Tree-Dialogue: 40x40 cm: Mixed Media: 2008

Tree-Dialogue: 40x40 cm: Mixed Media: 2008