After being exposed to art in my childhood, I have never left art far away. In my spare time I painted landscape every now and then, and more frequently, searched in various learning sources for answers to the question of what makes a good painting. 

In a painting, shapes are important, but more important are the value structure (the arrangement of light and dark tones), the color composition, and the edge quality (soft vs. hard edges). These are what attract our eyes to a picture in the first place, even though sometimes we are not aware of it. Human’s eyes are sensitive to patterns, coded in genes that date back to the time when human being lived in jungles. With eye vision not as acute as many animals in the jungle to catch details of objects to quickly identify preys or predators, human relied on the overall pattern of values, colors and edges to get alert.

The question of what pattern interests human’s eyes, however, has no easy answer. I find that only after seriously engaging in art, one can learn more and more about it. Being an artist, I can see the world in a different way than other people. Sometimes I can enjoy a scene — that an untrained person ignores — for its certain features such as a strong value pattern, subtle colors of atmospheric perspective, or varying edges revealing forms or textures. Nature is full of these beautiful things everywhere, and being able to see them is in a way the privilege of an artist.

And this is why I want to be an artist. I want to look for beauties hidden in the nature and share them with people, in a fun journey tracking down common human traits or senses, an ancient legacy that defines our aesthetics.