Maria Painting

Born in South Korea, now a long-term London resident, I work as an art technician and artist teacher in an independent school and am a member of ArtCan Artists. I studied Fine Art at Hong-Ik University, Seoul and took a post-compulsory PGCE at Institute of Education, UCL, London. I have exhibited in numerous galleries in Korea and England, including Highgate Fine Art, Museum of Modern Art, Busan, Gallery Pfo, Sutton House, Kingston Museum, the Korean Cultural Centre and D contemporary. I focus on portraits and try to capture the subtle emotions of the subjects and the atmosphere around them. I investigate the possibilities of figurative and abstraction in my contemporary portraits. I’m also interested in pondering on simple, delicate plants, as a plant is a small universe in itself. In both genres, I trail a wide brush across of some parts of my paintings and blur some figuration or smear some parts with a painting knife, like #GerhardRichter. While Richter blurs surfaces evenly, I keep some parts of paintings figurative and choose other parts to be abstracted. I like the possibilities of having control but also having some things not under control. By doing so, my intention is to represent flowing time, sway, and uncertainty. We are here now and we’ll be gone.