Lot
41
Creek
Oil on canvas, 2011
56 x 112 cm
Estimate
$5 000
Rick Leong’s painted landscapes are rooted in a bilingual vocabulary and style. Drawing on classical Chinese paintings, imagery, and symbols, his paintings incorporate a holistic view of the Canadian landscape and its convergence with the artist. Leong’s pursuit of nature as subject — and his own place within this context — uses the landscape tradition of the artist recording, and thus disseminating, an ongoing relational narrative. Informed by shifting botany and changes of season, place, time, and space, the artist roams through geography and species, always reinventing and telling stories. What isn’t remembered accurately is invented, forming a synthesis of inspiration, observation, memory, and imagination.
Biographical note
A third generation Chinese-Canadian, Rick Leong holds an MFA from Concordia University. Shortly after his graduation in 2007 his thesis work was acquired by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, affirming his emerging practice. In 2008 he was a finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, which travelled to venues such as the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Power Plant (Toronto), and the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver). Leong’s work is collected widely across Canada and can be found in the corporate collections of Senvest, Colart, the Aldo Group, and the Canada Council Art Bank.