HOA-LAN TRAN PORTFOLIO

HOA-LAN TRAN

Fine Art Portfolio

ARTIST’S BACKGROUND

I was born in Saigon, Vietnam. I was exposed to art at a very early age, learning from my father, Duy Liem Tran, who was known throughout Southeast Asia, France and Japan for his silk, oil and lacquer paintings. My father viewed art as a kind of religious pursuit. He taught me about integrity in art; and how to follow one's own vision as a way of life, rather than as a commercial enterprise or a road to fame.

My family's exposure to Western culture, through our French education, and exposure to American culture during the war, helped generate in my family an appreciation for what was best in both Western and Eastern cultures. I can see my work as a synthesis of both Western and Eastern artistic developments. My roots are in the East, but my head is very much in the West, with its emphasis on individual voice and personal quest for new languages of visual and verbal discovery.

I began my studies in Art in America in 1985 in Portland, and then transferred to the University of Oregon in 1989. I took architecture and painting degrees in 1995. I have worked in architecture in Eugene since my graduation, have been exhibiting my art in the Pacific Northwest for the last 18 years, being represented by galleries in Eugene, Portland, Seattle, and on the Oregon coast. In 2004 I returned to the UO to pursue an education in printmaking. I took a Bachelor of Fine Art (BFA) degree in printmaking in 2005. I completed my Master of Fine Art (MFA) degree in printmaking in 2007.

My painting tends to emphasize the human figure and architectural form, in watercolor, oil, acrylic and mixed media. My printmaking is more abstract, expressing more symbolically iconographic ideas that combine the techniques of woodcut, etching, silkscreen, and collagraph. Probably influenced by my architecture and painting, my printmaking tends toward a very large, installation-type format.

My work has been collected by investors and patrons from all over the United States, as well as Europe and Asia.

Influences:

The greatest influence in my artistic life has been my father. I grew up watching him work in his studio. He encouraged me to draw and paint. I often sat for hours just watching what he was doing. His work was influenced by Western art, and by the Art-Deco movement. He found beauty and poetry in everyday life, simple tasks of unpretentious lives.

I have been influenced by the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. and Rene Macintosh -- and by the paintings of Gustave Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Hundertvasser.

My strongest positive influences in printmaking came, first, from Paul Jacoulet who triggered in me a fascination with Japanese woodcut. I was also inspired by the work of Mikhail Chemiakin and Rhodo Boulanger. My greatest influence in printmaking, however, has been Robert Rauschenberg, who, in my mind, has been the world's greatest artist since Picasso. His Hoarfrost Series -- Sulphur, Moor, Emerald, Mint and Sybil -- completed in 1974-75, really showed me how unlimited printmaking could be as a media for artistic expression. Rauschenberg combined many different media with printing on traditional paper and also incorporated found objects in his compositions. Rauschenberg convinced me that printmaking was not a mundane craft but, rather, a media for the 21st century.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

When I first began to create art and architecture I thought that I was creating the work. But I soon discovered that, if I was truly creating the art, the art was also creating me. I was creating a vision in my work; but the work was also creating a vision in me. I rarely know where my work is leading me. But I am forced to follow the work, follow it through darkness, uneasiness, a lack of clarity. I have to give up control in this process. The work has a life of its own. I learned to follow its shapes, its colors, its meaning. I learned from the work. I learned to have faith that the work was leading me in the right direction. That the work knew what it was doing. The more sensitive I was to the life of the work, the more easily we (myself and the creative angel inside of me) worked together in a purposeful dialogue.

Art, to me, is a religious discipline. It is a process through which I can communicate with my better nature. There is a force inside of me which creates the world for me, gives me gifts and understandings. The more I learn to listen to this force or spirit or nature, the more robust becomes my appreciation of beauty, my desire for expression, and my appreciation of life's duality and, even more, its triplicity.

PAINTING

Acrylic