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"Sky, Day and Night I"
“Sky, Day and Night I”
Author

The Artist: After studying art at Seoul National University, Yoonsook Ryang left Korea in 1968 to join her sisters in the United States. She soon got married and started a family. But once the children started school, she went back for her master’s in fine arts at State University of New York at Buffalo. There she discovered a passion for abstract works rather than the representational painting she’d done all her life. “I was Asian old school, where you do what the teacher tells you to do,” she says. “But with abstract, I can do my own interpretation and be more creative.” Her method of choice is monotyping, a type of printmaking in which she paints on smooth Plexiglas. A printing machine takes up much of her one-car-garage studio in Irvine, where she and her husband have lived since 2006. Heavily influenced by scenes from nature, her work has been shown at the Festival of Arts for several years.   
 
The Artist’s inspiration: Nature is my passion.
With art, I appreciate it even more. It’s God’s creation. Last October my husband and I went on a trip to Patagonia. We went in all the little channels and on the islands. We went inland. We got to see a lot of glaciers and ice fields. The waters – so many different shades of blue! It was awesome. I really responded to the scenery. So I took a lot of pictures. Some of the pictures were of very small details, kind of representational. I knew I’d do something with them. I tried to capture the feeling of the environment. The sky was so blue. At night it was a dark blue, pitch dark. I chose yellow to represent a cloud or the sun. I just wanted to show some light. I wanted people to feel the vastness of the scenery, the cleanliness, the clear blue sky. It’s hard to reproduce those kinds of feelings, but I tried as best as I could.