| Description |
Li Dafang is an artist who belongs to his studio, where he paints hour after hour, day after day; it's no understatement to say that Li is disciplined and steadfast. He has developed a daily routine for work that he happily and faithfully adheres to. This mode of production, with long studio hours and intense concentration, is effective, and it stands in contrast to certain recent trends in artistic production - inspired by the market craze for contemporary Chinese art in the past few years - characterized by the separation of the conception of work by the artist and its actual execution by hired help.
Li Dafang's work is manual, persistent, time-consuming, and process-based. More importantly, the level-headedness of his working style gives form to a highly distinctive visual language that is impossible to replicate. He painstakingly applies each single stroke, line, and dot onto the canvas. Their accumulation creates precise and detailed depictions such as a tree, woods, a bush, and their surroundings. Sometimes the density of his strokes is such that it creates a blurred effect. The inexhaustible variation of his brush strokes, which cover the full spread of his canvases and leave no space untouched, contributes to the unique appeal of his paintings. One could almost say that Li's paintings are full of paintings. |