East meets West

>> Painter Rick Leong’s work is an enchanted
blend of the mythic and visceral

COLLECTOR’S ITEM: Leong

by CHRISTINE REDFERN

Last spring, Rick Leong graduated from Concordia University with a master’s in fine art. What made this accomplishment even more satisfying is that the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts purchased a piece from his thesis show. “Since then, it’s been crazy. Once you are collected by the museum, it is a validation of your work and a lot of collectors have become interested in purchasing my paintings,” comments Leong.

On his canvases, Leong plays with the vocabulary of the landscape—just from memory, not using any source material. Originally from the West Coast, he pursued his undergraduate degree at the University of Victoria and lived there for about a decade before moving to Montreal. “The island is quite insular and cut off from the rest of the world. I came to Montreal to get away from that and to study at Concordia.”

I look at two pieces that will be in his upcoming solo show of new works at the Parisian Laundry. The first is of a brightly coloured, stylized rainbow over a misty landscape. The second depicts swirling tree trunks in which Leong has used many lines to delineate the forest forms. In one place the trees seem to have morphed into bone, while at the bottom of the canvas, the rocks are animated with little faces.

ROOTED: “Hakuna Matata”

“One of the things with Chinese paintings is when they describe the work, they will say, ‘This line of mountains is like the back of a dragon,’ or ‘The three pines by the riverbed are like three old men hunched over playing a game of chess.’ They aren’t literally those things, but it is a kind of sentiment of the compositional device that they use. So what I’ve done is pushed this further. All these forms have a life of their own, a spirit. Here, the rocks along the bottom of the painting have turned into little heads having a dialogue.”

“There is always an element of the unexpected in it,” Leong continues. “Once you start seeing these hidden things in the work, you become an active, not a passive looker. The painting slowly unfolds for you and the longer you look, the more you’ll see.”

Rick Leong’s painting “Dancing Serpent in Dawn’s Quiet” is currently on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. His solo exhibition Wonderland at the Parisian Laundry runs from Jan. 11–Feb. 23, 3550 St-Antoine W, info: (514) 989-1056.