Silks

Some of these paintings were created recently, 2018. Others are a few samples of my solo exhibition in Saigon, Vietnam, back

in 1989. They were done with watercolor on silk, a special technique I learned from a well-known artist in Saigon, Ms Nguyen Thi Tam.

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To paint with this technique, first the silk has to be soaked with water. As soon as you apply the watercolor on the silk, the color immediately bleeds and blends, creating a foggy, dreamy look for the paintings.

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With the recent ones, I used acrylic instead of watercolor so that I could build up layers of colors on the silk surface without smearing the previous layers. However, I notice that with acrylic, I kind of lost the foggy, dreamy look of the traditional silk paintings.