Vietnamese artist Ho Huu Thu - Truth in Painting

Standing before a natural landscape, we register the view of the phenomenon at a certain moment, while time is passing the landscape and its light are changing. Therefore we can register that the view of a definite short time. The change of time would limit the description of nature and objects.


To say in other way, we note down the natural phenomenon and objects by our own feeling through the prism of our impression, and colors, lines, lights, and shades are filtered through an impressionistic style for that reason, all images and colors are simplified. As we don't want to depend on nature and objects, we change our way of seeing by our own idea, and henceforth, many different styles have been produced, such as Dada, symbolism, cubism, unrealism, etc . . .Or we use our reminiscence to recreate a past image, a past fact that is no more real but swayed and yet has lost all its authenticity. 


Using experience and reminiscence to recreate facts is not our real work, because time is a vividly changing stream, and our feelings and ideas are continually changing also. The nature and objects are an outer object to us and we can only perceive it partially though our normal senses as the genuine existence of nature and objects is something beyond the reach of our knowledge. 


We know that everything is changing. At every moment, unnumbered molecules are dying and the same amount is growing. Therefore, nature's life and objects are not still life, but are continually changing. How can we catch their genuine existence? 


We are living and creating with our thoughts, experiences and reminiscence. The continual impact of ecological environment has eclipsed the true of nature and objects. Prejudice is an opaque veil that usually hides the truth. Usually we don't see, hear or know the landscape that is lively existing, and we usually know it through the dead experience of the past that step by step became a closed iron wall. 


Man is made of two elements: reason and soul. The making of spirituality is due to the reception of elements from the outer world and the environment, finally become experience. The making of man's soul is totally pure. We usually think that we create this work with the idea of peace, of war, of the good, of the evil, of joy, of sadness, etc. While we don't know anything about what is happening in our soul. It seems we are living and creating only with old ideas that we have learned. We shut ourselves in the rudiment of beg of world of old knowledge and at times, take out some, subtracting and adding some to prepare a dish that we believe new. 


The truth is always in everyone's soul when man discards all his prejudice, ideas and knowledge. Creation means only to create a totally new living, which never 


existed in this world. Therefore we are usually surprised when we see new and strange things created by abstract painters. The new abstract form we first see never existed in our knowledge that make us surprised and think it is unreal. Truth in artistic creation doesn't mean something we have known, but something we draw out from our own 's soul. 


Each of us has a very sensitive part of mentality that can see and perceive in a pure manner when all prejudice are discarded. 


Abstract painting is a reality which veils in everyone 's mind, when all the false thoughts of the painters and the appreciation come to an end. 


Ho Huu Thu