CHEN YANNING (CHINESE B.1945)Young boy with fruit Oil on board, 51 x 73cmSigned Chen Yanning (b.1945) is a Chinese painter who lives and works in the United States. He was born in the southern province of Guangzhou, where he studied at their Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1965. He continued to work at the Academy as a painter until 1986 when he relocated to America, to study at Oklahoma City University. His early Chinese works include the poster Chairman Mao Inspects the Guangdong Countryside (1972) and New Doctor of the Fishing Port (1973). His has had many public portrait commissions most notably for the British Royal Family, in which he painted Queen Elizabeth, Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Anne. Yanning’s portrait of the Queen was subsequently used by Royal Mail for the Jubilee Year stamp. This present work is an example of the artist’s early paintings and was acquired by the present owner directly from the artist. It depicts a young man set against the background of a blossoming tree. The compositional arrangement it quite unusual and highly idiosyncratic. Yanning places the figure at the bottom of the canvas, on the threshold of the picture plane. Only his head is visible, his arms and body cut off from view. It is almost as if he has briefly popped his head up into the picture space, all of sudden occupying the otherwise empty vista of a flowering prunus tree. Yanning has used the device to create a sense of movement in the work, an immediacy between the viewer and the otherwise static painted surface. Yanning is working in oil paint, a medium predominantly used by western artists. Chinese painting was traditionally based around the technique of ‘brush painting’, which consisted of similar techniques to calligraphy using black ink or coloured pigments. Although a very different medium to oil paint, Yanning’s portraits, in employing an impasto technique, which imbues the surfaced with an almost blurred ‘wash’ finish, seems to suggest the sustained influence of his country’s native painting.