Zhaoming Wu is a Chinese painter and teacher who has been a professor of painting at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art in China and is currently an instructor of panting at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

His work has garnered awards in China, Europe and the U.S. and has been featured in a number of publications including Art of the West and International Artist Magazine.

Wu paints figures, portraits and landscapes in an open, extremely painterly style, in which the character of the paint-laden brushstrokes seem as important as the forms they define. The brushstrokes, in fact, often are the forms, with deceptively simple textured strokes that make up folds of cloth or the shapes of buildings.

In his landscapes and room interiors, Wu emphasizes the geometry of the forms and sets aside areas of color as distinct shapes, deliberately blurring or obscuring detail in favor of composition and color.

Even his drawings are “painterly”. There is a nice selection of drawings on his site, in which contrast and tone take on the role color plays in his paintings, edges are often blurred or smeared, and background tones roughed out in a manner evocative of brush strokes.

[Suggestion courtesy of Evan Waldinger]