Favourites
Clementine Chan is one of Hong Kong's most celebrated painters. Her works include The Four Seasons postcards and many other stunning paintings of elongated figures amid a solitary landscape. Here she reveals her five favourite painters.
Vincent van Gogh
I've admired van Gogh since an early age. I love his use of flaming and vivid colours as well as big brush strokes of thick paint. The Dutch painter, who died after shooting himself, immersed himself passionately in his paintings. Among his many works, my favourite is Starry Night. This is due to my love for Don Mclean's Vincent, a song that talks about the life of van Gogh. The song starts with the lyrics 'Starry, starry night'.
Henri Matisse
The colours in Matisse's paintings are very bright, pleasant and vivid. His art brims with innocence, and viewing his paintings is a very positive experience. Matisse was confined to a wheelchair due to illnesses in the later years of his life. But his vitality enables him to continue making art, and he did a lot of paper cuts using strong, basic colours such as blue, yellow and red when he was too weak to stand at an easel. His work La Dance has made a huge impression on me.
Claude Monet
I liken Monet to a photographer who tried to capture the impact of light on a subject at different moments. He liked to concentrate on series of pictures in which he painted subjects such as churches, haystacks and sea waves at different times of the day in different lights. His works are like photographs shot with a soft-filter lens - misty but mesmerising. His series of paintings on water lilies were really impressive when I saw them in a museum.
Alberto Giocometti
Giocometti, who is also a sculptor, is my most favourite artist and painter. His oil paintings particularly touch me. Giocometti's characters in his drawings are very lonely people whose limbs and bodies are elongated. They walk alone and never communicate with each other. Giocometti's father, also a painter, was said to have been critical of his drawings. But Giocometti said that's how people appeared to him when he drew.
El Greco
He was a 17th century painter who did a lot of religious paintings. But his works are very modern if we study them from today's perspective. El Greco's use of strong colours and the elongation of his subject's face, body and limbs in paintings detach him from the realism of his century and separate him from his contemporaries. I like figures that are long and thin, and most characters in my recent paintings are elongated.
