Yuan
Chen

The Painting Process

Yuan Chen paints in Studio 31 at Art Works Downtown, a busy artists' building on Fourth Street in San Rafael, where visitors can find her at work from Wednesday to Saturday afternoons. She works in acrylic and oil, and sometimes mixed media, on canvas, linen and panel, moving between small 12-inch studies and canvases four feet wide. For Yuan, abstraction is a way to communicate beyond words. She is drawn to the expressive possibilities of paint itself, to color, texture and movement, and uses them to explore emotion, energy and the natural world. She does not set out to illustrate a story. Instead she lets each painting open into an intuitive space, a place where a viewer can bring their own memories and feelings. Each canvas is a balance of spontaneity and intention. Gestures and layers of color arrive freely, and then she responds to them with care, looking for harmony within complexity. She describes each stroke and color as a note in a symphony of emotions, a silent conversation with herself and an unspoken dialogue with others. Her titles show where that process leads: Light Finds Form, What Wants to Emerge, The Moment of Becoming, Quietly, It Opens. Many works grow into series, such as Unfold Before Your Eyes, Love You Softly and Kind of Blue, where she returns to an idea and lets it change from one panel to the next. Behind it all is a search for inner peace, and for the beauty found in embracing imperfection.