Liang Jun Yan

At Leona Craig Art, we're not in a rush to add artists: collections are not built in a day, a month, or even a year.  Indeed, the collection that I eventually put in my art inn, in the 1990's, was actually built over a period of 20 years.  We have people sending us art and stopping by to show us art on a daily basis, and we meet other artists when we are out and about, sometimes in the most unexpected places.  Thus, it was with Liang Jun Yan: her sister is our next door neighbor, in the apartment building where we live.  And one day when Ayu forgot her key, the neighbors invited her in for a rest to wait for me to get home from teaching at the university, and chatting, one thing led to another.
Having taken art lessons from various artists, as a child, Liang Jun Yan (Winnie) studied oil painting at the Guangzhou Institute of Literature and Art under Liang Zhaotang, who was born in the mid-1940's and was a well-known Red artist, during the reign of Mao.  While at art school, she did intense research into 19th century Russian and European painting techniques, focusing on painters, like Shishkin, Repin, Monet and Cezanne.  The style that she developed is rather realistic but with a twist: her works involve a lot of small dabs of brushwork, giving them an impasto finish that makes them look a bit grainy, like old photographs.  Her palette is characterized by deep, dark, rich earthy tones, much like the Russian masters that she emulates.   The result is quite appealing to the eye.
Like many young artists of her generation, Liang took a job in advertising, as her day job, while continuing to pursue her passion for oil painting in her spare time.  To broaden her life experience, she worked in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Yunnan, during the early 2000's after graduating from art school.  During those few years, she won national awards for her art in advertising, but she was feeling that she had little time to pursue her dream as a fine artist.  As a result, in 2005, she took a lesser role in advertising, and devoted more time to her art.  Over the last decade she has also traveled extensively, taking in and chronicling on canvas such wondrous lands as India, Tibet, Vietnam, Cambodia, Qinghia, Xinjiang, Hunan, and Gansu provinces, in China, where she has captured the simple lives and the beauty of those mountainous regions.  The objective of her journeys was also to experience other cultures, especially those that were quite different from her native cosmopolitan Guangzhou.  It is the collection of works from those journeys into other cultures and other geographies that we now offer at our gallery.