“Scraped” paintings
When you first see a painting by Wen, you can’t help but be drawn to the powerful cut lines filling the canvas. Her Earth, Air, Fire, Water series, which is currently on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, provides classic examples of her work. Artists typically layer lighter colors atop a dark background, but Wen uses lighter colors as the base. After she’s built up sufficiently thick layers of paint, she cuts lines into the still wet paint with a stylus, scraping paint away to reveal the lighter colors underneath. As dark becomes light, it creates color gradients along the seemingly irregular lines, each of which contributes to her vision. Her flames shift with the direction of the wind, and the color of her water is affected by the color of the night. Wen’s works depict things she has seen in the real world. They are abstract expressions of concrete phenomena, Eastern ink-wash scenes rendered in Western oils.
Wen shows how the temperature of the seawater and the light reflecting off it bring out different colors in its surface. Her scraping technique captures the momentary changes in the colors of the surface, incorporating reflections from the waves into the deep blue of the sea. Her powerful lines bring the flat surfaces of paintings to life, giving them depth and making them appear to move.
She spent nine months working on her first depiction of water using her oil-scraping technique, 1996’s 16-meter-long Water Mural. She went on to make subtracting dark from light her signature technique and through it earned a place in the international art community. In the years since Water Mural, Wen has been invited by the US Department of State to exhibit her paintings in 13 US embassies, including those in Jordan, Singapore and the Philippines, and to work as a cultural ambassador for contemporary art in Botswana, Denmark, Poland and Malaysia.
Having cast off the constraints of traditional techniques, the prolific Wen worked for a time on huge oil paintings and on canvases mounted on oval stretchers. In 2014, she created of a series of “scraped” flower paintings on canvases mounted to flower-blossom-shaped stretchers. The series consists of images of beautiful peonies, elegant white ginger lilies, and gentle pansies from her own garden, depicted in lively, saturated colors that convey the power of feminine warmth and tenacity.
Water Mural, 305 x 1524 cm, 1996. Leigh Wen’s language of scraped lines gives her paintings visual depth and a certain moodiness.