1st Prize Winner
RAYMAR Traditional Art Award

Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize 2024

Victor Wang

Title:

“The Angel of Sunflower”

Medium & Dimensions:

Oil, 63 x 48 in.

About the Artist

Victor Wang grew up in Northern China and graduated BFA from The Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, one of three top art institutes in China. After graduation he taught there for four and a half years and was sent to The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a visiting scholar. He earned his MFA in Fontbonne University. He currently lives in St. Louis, where he teaches painting, drawing and graduate critique classes as a full professor at Fontbonne University. Victor has exhibited widely across the country and internationally and has won various awards for excellence, including awards for both painting and art instruction. His work has been shown nationally and internationally. The human figures in his paintings serve as vehicles to convey human experience, representing the emotional tension and psychological drama of life’s turning points. Nostalgia, harmony, passion, agony, sadness, and pleasure are all revealed in his new body of work in the last decade. The images portrayed in his art are provoked by childhood memories and past experiences.

An artist often tells one story repeatedly; however, his story is created from the images and feelings from his past experiences that represent the memories of his life. Technically, Wang was influenced by the exaggerated way Auguste Rodin uses clay to model figures. He has tried to treat his paint on canvas as the equivalent of a sculptor’s clay to build up form on canvas. The thickness of the paint evokes a sculptural physicality.

“The Angel of Sunflower”: Her wings are woven from sunbeam threads,
A halo of warmth stop her blue head.
With each gentle breeze, she twirls and spins,
A guardian of joy where the sunlight begins.