Z. Z. Wei

Last night, Anjie and I wandered down to the Art Walk in Seattle mostly to see our friend Marty Gordon’s work at Lustre Communication. It was a great party, and the art was pretty fantastic. On the way back home, we stopped by the Patricia Rovzar Gallery, where I ran into my good friend Sam Vance and his mom. The reason we stopped at the gallery was simple: from the street we could see these amazing paintings. So we went in and encountered some of the most powerful work I’ve seen in a long time. Luscious color, muscular line and form, iconic shapes from of fields, farms and the vehicles from an older age…I could have stood in that gallery a long, long time.

It made me wonder all over again about the power of art. The canvas is simple, the colors the same ones anybody can find in a tube at an art store. These are just buildings and trucks and fields, yet what they evoke in me in inexplicable. The blues in this warm palette were especially affecting. As Sam said, Wei, who lives in Shoreline, breaks all the rules when it comes to color, yet it works so amazingly. I don’t know enough about the rules to know which ones he’s breaking, but I’m so glad he breaks them.

Thank God for beauty…