" The Compassionate Eye "   by   Jia Lu October 20 - 29, 2011 West Market Square Location
"Patience" Oil on Canvas, 30" x 20" Call for price         WMS	"Compassion Series: Invisible World" Oil on canvas, 24" x 24" Call for price         WMS	"Sacred Waters" Oil on panel, 24" x 24" Sold
"First Light" Oil on canvas, 24" x 20" Call for price         WMS	"Last Light" Oil on canvas, 24" x 20" Call for price         WMS	"Tierra" Oil on canvas, 16" x 12" Sold
"Fuego" Oil on canvas, 12" x 16" Sold
Watercolour Sketches

Jia Lu  

Born in China in 1954, Jia Lu grew up in a family of artists. Raised in a home surrounded by plaster casts of world sculpture, she came to an early appreciation of the beauty and power of the human figure. Jia Lu was already an accomplished figure painter in Western and Chinese media when she left China for Canada in 1983.

Jia Lu’s oil paintings combine Asian spiritual and philosophical inspiration with European classical realism. Her work draws the viewer on silver threads into a world of light and wonder, of deep respect and quiet wisdom. It is a world inhabited by graceful figures contemplating the mysteries of existence, secure, supremely confident and self- assured. In her most characteristic works, Jia Lu’s imagery seems to drift on the edge of a waking dream. The quiet introspection in her figures is the result of a long fascination with Buddhism, and particularly the medieval Buddhist art of Central Asia where she has spent much of her time.

Jia Lu’s realism and detail, built on years of rigorous training in both Eastern and Western traditions, reveal a love for surface and texture. Dignity and solitude emanate from her works, captured and preserved at their most dramatic and universal moment. "For me the challenge is to create beauty," says Lu, "to better persuade my viewers to look again at their life and the world around them..." As a result, Jia Lu’s paintings belong to a tradition of narrative, realistic art that speaks for itself even while her work has much in common with contemporary figurative trends.

Recognized as one of the leading figurative painters to come from China since the 1980’s, Jia Lu has over one hundred international exhibitions to her credit. Her works are prominently featured in private and public collections around the world.

The theme of my recent paintings is "Compassion." I spent a long time thinking about this idea, which is at the core of Buddhist and Christian faith, and considered many ways to express it. The obvious ways - to illustrate acts of compassion - places the viewer at a distance, in the role of an audience listening to a story. But I felt compassion was not something a stranger does for another stranger, but describes a relationship we enjoy with the world around us. Every day we are the beneficiaries of a compassionate universe, that supplies us with light and warmth, water and food, and often love and company, for free.

My son the astrophysicist says our bodies are composed of elements forged in the cores of burning stars and spread over the vast universe by the deaths of mighty suns. By themselves these chemicals are inert and lifeless, but when they are arranged in just the right way, they come to life, and order small parts of the universe in compositions of their own. Compassion is the result of understanding that without one another we have no meaning. Our existence, our consciousness, our materiality, the very concepts of "we" and "I" owe everything to the arrangement of these living elements in a spatial frame.

I decided to place my figures - young women, who represent all that is graceful and beautiful in a human soul - in the company of other strange, living creatures, so the viewer knows they are related to one another, care one for the other, depend on each other, regardless of scale or even visibility.

Jia Lu, 2010