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Intimate Portrait
Intimate PortraitOona Huen
What are some of the skills required for quick portrait sketches? Were there any memorable stories when you worked with portrait clients?
When drawing, I try to capture the emotional connections between people in the process, focusing on their facial expressions and the contentment in their smile. I hope to preserve such precious moments for them through my work.
Works that I find most memorable are often those related to departure, such as portraits in memory of beloved pets that have recently died. When drawing such works, I could feel the intensity of both the owner’s reluctance to let go of the animal and their sense of gratitude to them – it’s a sad but beautiful farewell. I also remember being commissioned to produce a parting gift for a male same-sex couple after their breakup. Such experiences remind me to always cherish the moments I have with my pet and people close to my heart.
Among the creative mediums you work with (painting, fabric art, music, clay craft), which one do you find best expresses your inner thoughts?
Painting is like a journey for me. I start by aspiring to an ideal of a feeling within me to prompt me to start drawing. I rarely finish a drawing in one sitting – as soon as I start drawing, my life and the creative process will have a mutual impact on each other. It’s like embarking on a trip – you feel lost at times, but there are also mysteries around the corner and pleasant surprises.
I enter a state of extreme quietness when making fabric and embroidery art, almost like walking on the fabric, putting one foot in front of the other one step at a time. It is a very different experience from painting, where brushstrokes leaps all over the paper. Embroidery has become for me a way to quiet the mind. Working at snail’s pace, the process allows me to hear my inner voice which otherwise gets drowned out in the normal environment, and that always brings me a strong sense of connectedness with the finished work.
Music to me is like telling stories through singing, and it provides a way for me to connect with people who are my contemporaries. Music is a powerful and highly dynamic form of expression, an alternative channel for expressing my emotions and a counterbalance to other forms of art creation that I carry out in more serene environments.
As for clay art, it allows me to transfer emotion directly through my touch onto the clay, quite spontaneously and with little need to think ahead. And very often the finished product ends up being an unexpectedly good vessel for carrying my feelings.
What messages would you like to convey to the audience through your work?
Through my work, I wish to share with people my appreciation for the simplest and most natural of things in everyday life. My drawings mainly feature flowers, plants and animals. I create on the canvas a space for preserving the joys of life, a place where cute pigs, bears and other animals roam. I hope people can feel the lovely and warm world that I create when looking at my work.
You make art with children. What have you observed from them? Does it bring back memories?
Children are born to feel with their hearts. They are very real, completely trusting and unaffected in their expression. They have the magical ability to revel in a fantasy world of their own creation, something that we have lost as adults. It reminds me not to lock up my emotions or be confined to my current cognitive space. Imagination is a precious gift that should be preserved and often used.
Going forward, what would be your creative direction? Or will there be new mediums you may want to try?
Going forward, my creative direction will remain focused on nature and animals. I wish to understand life through the changes in nature, and capture that in my works.
There is also a delicate and subtle feeling brewing within me waiting to be expressed. I am thinking of realising them as works using watercolor and epoxy resin.
