A Very Cool Landscape Painting – Crisp

Posted on March 18, 2021 by mfsadmin

Though lately I am mostly attracted to shifting patterns, colors, tones, and shapes, from time to time, I am still inspired by pure scenery, particularly when I can discern such variations, and especially if the landscape evokes strong emotions such as moody melancholy. Such an image I had encountered in Manchurian China, barely a few months before the pandemic started to ravage the globe, intrigued and challenged me to create an oil painting when sheltered at home, Crisp, an understated work aptly captured a sense of community, isolation, and resilience.

Crisp
22” x 28”
Oil on Canvas
Completed in 2020

This painting is being exhibited in Biafarin Online Exhibition (March 10 – April 10, 2021): Exhibizone – Winter 2021 Catalog.

Lost in a Metropolis – “Itinerant”

Posted on November 29, 2020 by mfsadmin

My recent Itinerant is a deliberately ambiguous piece, which depicts three almost identical figures spacing out in an empty boulevard. In the background, there are vague outlines of standing or seated figures, and a couple of vehicles, shaded beneath a huge awning or a theater marquee, or in the cast shadow of an imposing steel-glass structure, whose richly patterned façade was somewhat menacing. The strong contrast between the dark and obscure background and the brightly-lit and clearly defined street generates a strong dissonance. The almost identical postures and shapes of these three figures are enigmatic and hard to fathom. They are like roaming ghosts and can either be the same person appearing in three locations in sequence, or a group of persons march in unison. To ground the tableau, a partial figure bent over to reach the ground appears at the lower right of the canvas, adding an extra visual focus.

Itinerant
22” x 28”
Oil on Canvas
Completed in 2020

Naughty Boy’s “Boyhood”

Posted on September 21, 2020 by mfsadmin

Depicting human beings is both challenging and exciting, because of the complexity of the human emotions, and the viewers’ familiarity with expressions and postures associated with these emotions, which suffers no falsehood.

My recent Boyhood attempted to capture the instance when a confident and cocky urchin, insistently pressed himself upon the viewers, announcing his presence. Though a little naughty, he still possessed his innocence, and his wonderment at the broader world surrounding him was palpably touching, and hopefully would viewers of their tender ages.

The background was sparse, and open, allowing much space for the boy to occupy, except for a pair of moving legs towards the center space and seemingly poised to displace the boy. Perhaps, it was the man he was to become. The confluence of presence and future was both touching and a bit unnerving.

Boyhood
28”x22”
Oil on Canvas
Completed in 2020

Featured Painting – Silent Party

Posted on May 22, 2020 by mfsadmin

Starting this horizontal group portrait in a somewhat more upbeat time, employing a colorful palette, I aimed to create a group of people engaged in dialogues and interactions. However, during the painting process, those figures took more and more an air of despondency, and the vibrant colors started to become untruthful and had to fade. A couple of months later, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the piece was finally completed, it had morphed into a monochromatic nightmarish hallucination, featuring some sketchily painted heads, shrouded in white gauze, turning into different directions, strikingly silhouetted against pitch dark background, and emoting resignation, sadness, and anger. Though compressed in space, they seemed hardly related to one another, and remained in utter isolation; a party without conversation. To their left, a jumble of cantilevered structures protruded from the distance, adding an atmosphere of foreboding and disintegration. This painting ended with a sad wailing note, aptly echoing the signs reverberating in our daunting time.

Silent Party
18”x36”
Oil on Canvas
Completed in 2020

Featured Painting – Emergence

Posted on January 26, 2020 by mfsadmin

At first glance, Emergence is a calm sliver of routine life due to the simplicity of its composition and color scheme; upon closer inspection, what emerged from this picture was not so simple, rather it revealed something indecipherable and with a hint of sinisterness: against a sparse backdrop, a few curious looking, semi-translucent figures floated like ghosts from behind thin vertical bars, which made the whole landscape reminisce of a jail cell, despite the openness of those bars. What was emerging? Inner strength? Outside menace? Guilty conscience? Or stoical indifference to anyone’s fate?

Emergence
22” x 28”
Oil on Canvas
Completed in 2019

Featured Painting – Quarry

Posted on October 15, 2019 by mfsadmin

Eerie stillness was a sense I tried to convey when I made the oil painting, Quarry, which was bleached of colors, as if they would have been intrusive in such a disused quarry, which seemed demanding viewers to hold breaths, and surrender to an overwhelming hush and foreboding, closed in by the knife-sharp white cliffs, and the deep pool of inky dead water captured in the middle. Nature, ravaged.

Quarry
24” x 30”
Oil on Canvas
Completed in 2019

Featured Painting – Dream Forest

Posted on February 18, 2019 by mfsadmin

Dream Forest continued my exploration of monochromatic paintings consisting of interlocking patterns and shades, some simple, some more intricate. This small gouache painting depicted an imaginary forest at night time, when moon light shimmered over truncated trunks and branches, contrasting starkly with dark surrounding. Also, the image somehow resembled a microscopic view of organism, a tiny sliver of macrocosm.

Dream Forest
7” x 11”
Gouache on Paper
Completed in 2018

Featured Painting – Away

Posted on December 22, 2018 by mfsadmin

Away is a fantastical portrait of a young man, whose striking features outlined in broad and loose strokes, staring at viewers unflinchingly. Lifting the portrait beyond realism realm were two white patches hovering just below the sitter’s eyes, as if two small wings had grew out of his deep thoughts and were ready to bear him away, from the confinement of the tight space allotted to him, from the heavy vertical bars on both sides, and from the ruined bridge and houses on the corners of top right and lower left, respectively, testaments of some traumatic past.

Away
Oil on Canvas
24” x 20”
Completed in 2018

Feathered Oil Painting – Interlocked

Posted on November 20, 2018 by mfsadmin

A landscape as an enigma is the impression of my monochromatic oil painting, Interlocked, which depicts a semi-abstract, difficult to decipher landscape, under the threat of heavy and broadly zigzagged clouds in the upper region, while underneath, an orderly and calm swatch of staggered and slightly angled roofs, indicates order, and furthermore, social hierarchy and constraints. The dripping liquids permeating the landscape lends the notion of connectedness and the interlocking nature of the environment, natural or man-made.

Interlocked
Oil on Canvas
30” x 24”
Completed in 2018

Featured Drawing – Formation

Posted on May 9, 2018 by mfsadmin

The monotonous grayness of the cold climate landscape, though off-putting to some, holds special attraction for me, perhaps, nostalgia is the root of such attachment. I love the blanketing quietness stealthily imposed upon the environment, and appreciate the occasional higher values (not necessarily more vibrant colors) which enliven the space rhythmically and musically. My charcoal drawing Formation is such a presentation of the cool, unyielding, yet not totally unfriendly northern place which tenderly and harshly nurtured my growth. Almost puritanical, yet beautiful in its heart-rending austere bleakness.

Formation
11.5” x 18”
Charcoal on Paper
Completed in 2018

Matthew Felix Sun

— Award-Winning San Francisco Bay Area Fine Artist

Tag Archives: Featured Work