Existing comment:
Catchers
Hung Liu based this painting on a 1939 photograph by Dorothea Lange. Two young children gaze in opposite directions, and from Lange's caption, we learn they are migrant children, living at a Farm Security Administration mobile camp in Merrill, Oregon. Lange's portraits of migrant children are especially poignant for Liu, who remembers feeling a lack of control over her destiny while working in the fields during the Cultural Revolution.
Liu chose to remain faithful to many of the compositional elements in Lange's black-and-white image, but she deliberately used color and style to emphasize the hopeful aspect of looking ahead toward a brighter future. She translated the original's gray barren landscape into a textured ground of gold and brown hues. A rolling green and magenta hill sits on the horizon. Even more, the fine lines of color we see in Liu's figures -- green and orange whisps of hair, for example, serve to tie the children to the land.
Oil on canvas, 2019
Collection of Tim and Donna Jones |