Art 'n' Stuff

This is where all things, in all the kinds of art, will be kept. A rambling blog of someone wandering around the art world.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Sylvia Ji

 Sylvia Ji is a contemporary artist working out of the L.A. area. Ji's paintings feature the femme fatale at it's finest. Ji's recent work has been based intently of seductive, powerful, and entrancing women. Each painting displays a power of a sexual being, each subject has brute strength, yet each has delicate and whimsical attributes.

One beautiful aspect of Ji's work is the contrast between a three dimensional and two dimensional. The painting on the left, for example, is done in this contrast. The woman's face and body are painted in three dimensional shades and tones, while her hair and decorative roses sit flat against the canvas. I love this contrast, even with her Day of the Dead style paintings, the faces are fully developed by expression, the flat face paint adding it's juxtaposition perfectly . Ji's illustration style mixed with her painting skills is a wondrous addition to a classical theme of powerful and seductive women.





When I first came across Ji's work, she was featured in Hi-Fructose Magazine. Her paintings stunned me! Each one held my attention, starting with the face. The expression on each face was so different from the contemporary art I had encountered. The emotional grab these expressions have pull attention from the face through the surrounding hair, which reflects art nouveau's organic movement,  then moves the viewer down through out the rest of the painting. Ji creates a movement in each painting which flows so well with the eye. Even as simple a movement from top to bottom it might be, it still holds my attention, which can be hard at times.
 

 Each subject lends itself to a whole story. This is another aspect of Ji's work fascinates me. There are tiny details in each piece of work. The tiny bugs pictured in the background, sometimes interacting with the main subject. There are other works where there are drips of fluid on the dresses ro breasts of the subjects. The fluid could be blood, or face paint, or any combination of imaginative concoctions. 


To find out more about Sylvia Ji you can find her website here. And hopefully you do. At her website you can see her work from 2005 spanning to her current work. It's a great way to see how her paintings developed over the years. Ji is an excellent contemporary artist, to which I believe much more will come from her!

2 comments:

  1. Sylvia's work is incredible. Before design school I was an apprentice to tattoo and I often found myself studying her work and using it as inspiration for some of the tattoo flash watercolors I would paint. Not many can pull of 2D and 3D on the same page and still create a harmony between the two dimensions.

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  2. I'm a sucker for portraits. I've always been a fan of sylvia and i think its because its like a modern more cultured and stylized Gustav Klimt.

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