Juliet Shen infuses her brushstrokes with energy. Her main source of inspiration and renewal has always been the natural landscape. She sees the constant transformations taking place in nature mirroring our own spiritual and creative life in similar flux.
Following a lengthy and rewarding career in graphic design, Shen resumed drawing and painting, her original passion. She owes her reconnection with fine art to the supportive artists of the Duwamish River Artist Residency for their acceptance and encouragement. Starting in the summer of 2012, she began making drawings in Seattle’s industrial Duwamish waterway, and continued by herself in the Union Bay Natural Area, a reclaimed wetland on top of an old waste dump. When inclement weather finally forced a retreat indoors, she used her observations of the shifting Northwest landscape to create drawings combined with relief printing.
Po-Yan Tsang is a contemporary representational painter aware of both natural beauty and environmental destruction. Inspired by ocean scenes and landscapes, Tsang is quick to find human debris amidst the beauty. Her works start from direct observation, through plein air painting, still life setups, or reference sketches and photos she takes herself. She captures a mood around a scene: the feeling of sunshine in the forest, a discarded plastic bag, a glacier we know to be subject to melting. In choosing mundane, overlooked objects and natural landscapes, her works contemplate themes around our relationship with nature, consumerism, and human impact on the environment.
