ALAN LAU
Born in 1948 in Oroville, CA Alan studied in Japan at the Nanga School in Kyoto and the University of California in Santa Cruz. He came to Seattle in the late 1970's and has exhibited regularly in solo and group shows in the area. Also a poet, he has had several works published. His paintings, sumi on paper, are also very poetic, predominantly black and white. Water, sky, rocks are often suggested.


Alan Lau draws on his day job as a produce worker at Uwajimaya for some of the inspiration for his paintings.  In a statement for the show he writes:  "The hours spent sorting texture, color, beauty and decay in preparation for display gives your mind time to wander.  Yet most of the time we spend on this earth is given to the process of work and that can't help but effect everything else we do."  While attention to the elegance and complexity of the natural world underlies much of Lau's work, music and Western and Eastern visual arts traditions also play a role.  His work is both thematically and formally rich.  Using a mixture of media including sumi ink, oil pastel, and China markers Lau lays down a network of marks that eventually click into compositional place. This process produces paintings with transparent surfaces of varying density held together by a subtle but clear formal structure.  The show will include work in both black and white and color and in a variety of sizes ranging from 12 x 8" to 55" square.   Lau's last solo show at the Seders Gallery was in 2001.  Since that time his work has been included in The Drawn Image at Evergreen State College (2002), Variations of Abstraction:  Selections from the City of Seattle's Portable Collection at City Space (2003), Eric Ansel, Bruce Campbell, Alan Lau, Ted Murphy at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College (2004), and Past Present at the Archer Gallery at Clark College in Vancouver WA (2005).


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