ARTIST MODEL- Brent Wong

A self-taught painter, Wong’s artistic career began in the field of drawing. After brief experimentations with watercolour and oil, he settled on acrylic as his medium of choice. Its quick drying qualities gave him the flexibility to easily apply successive coats of paint and make drastic changes where necessary. He has been known to spend more than three years on a painting before he consented to its public display, adding countless layers of acrylic paint to achieve a jewel-like lustre to his surfaces. The expansive view outside his Vivian Street family home in central Wellington captured his attention and prompted the frequent architectural presences and geometric patterns in his earlier paintings. The stretch of rooftops and myriad of residential and office buildings seen from his window are dominant shapes and motifs throughout his oeuvre, but these do not reflect a fixation for nostalgia, instead an instance of Wong using his memory to inhabit the landscape. His early works were initially composed as line drawings of interiors and three-dimensional formations with exaggerated perspectives. Like a stage set, Wong then experimented with proportions and colour.