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Lot Essay
The present lot is a complete and delightful contrast to the more soberly rendered Two horses (lot 92). Painted in 1959, Three horses contains the essence of a traditional Chinese ink painting even though it is rendered in oil.
Like many of his oil on board works, Man Fong embellish the composition with the sprinkling of foliage, often truncated to convey a lyrical sense of arrangement and poetic structure reminiscent of a traditional Chinese ink work. Going beyond that, the artist has not employed his usual method of rendering his subject, in this case, the horses in anatomical precision, which often results in creating a volumetric sense of bearing, producing a substantiated object in the make-believe world of the painting.
Instead the three houses are rendered with a skillful manipulation of ink and taking full advantage of the spontaneous and capricious nature of the medium. Representation of the horses are done by smearing and dabbling of the fluid, it is Man Fond at his best as one sees his precise control of the material. Without a preparatory outlining of his subject, he first applies the ink onto the board and paints the face and the body of the animals by controlling the movement of the ink as well as the intensity of the fluid. With a limited range of colour, he uses the monochromatic ink in graduations thus creating the nuances and shades just like the Chinese ink masters and in accordance to the pillar of the Chinese painting that stipulates: the five colours of black.
The result is a soft and whimsical representation of the horses which is light and seemingly 'floating' above the composition. A poetic sense is created with the calligraphic purity and simplicity of lines that is made possible with the elegant touch of the artist, in turn reminiscent of the works of the Chinese artist Xu Bei Hong.
Like many of his oil on board works, Man Fong embellish the composition with the sprinkling of foliage, often truncated to convey a lyrical sense of arrangement and poetic structure reminiscent of a traditional Chinese ink work. Going beyond that, the artist has not employed his usual method of rendering his subject, in this case, the horses in anatomical precision, which often results in creating a volumetric sense of bearing, producing a substantiated object in the make-believe world of the painting.
Instead the three houses are rendered with a skillful manipulation of ink and taking full advantage of the spontaneous and capricious nature of the medium. Representation of the horses are done by smearing and dabbling of the fluid, it is Man Fond at his best as one sees his precise control of the material. Without a preparatory outlining of his subject, he first applies the ink onto the board and paints the face and the body of the animals by controlling the movement of the ink as well as the intensity of the fluid. With a limited range of colour, he uses the monochromatic ink in graduations thus creating the nuances and shades just like the Chinese ink masters and in accordance to the pillar of the Chinese painting that stipulates: the five colours of black.
The result is a soft and whimsical representation of the horses which is light and seemingly 'floating' above the composition. A poetic sense is created with the calligraphic purity and simplicity of lines that is made possible with the elegant touch of the artist, in turn reminiscent of the works of the Chinese artist Xu Bei Hong.