Thanksgiving, 1621
In a phone call from Shanghai this week, Woodstock artist Hongnian Zhang explained how he first got the idea for his monumental painting, Thanksgiving, 1621, some 20 years ago.
At the time he was just finishing, and exhibiting, a series of 22 paintings depicting Pilgrim life, inspired by a trip he’d made to the Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts… and the fact that he was still so proud of having moved to the United States seven years earlier.
“I realized how great it would be to make a monumental painting of the great dinner itself,” he said via Skype. “But I didn’t get around to doing it.”
Three years ago, he added, a collector of Zhang’s wanted to commission a large work for his dining room in Los Angeles. And immediately, Hongnian remembered his earlier idea.
“I say to them, ‘What about a Thanksgiving Day painting?’” he recalled. “And I begin with my composition, the hiring of models and deep research I do, all around the idea of people coming back from war to have this peaceful dinner.”
The artist explains how he completed the 10 foot x6 foot painting in the studio he shares with his wife, the portrait painter Lois Wooley.
“I would stretch the canvas in my studio in paint, then take it off the stretcher to remove it,” he said. “Their dining room, it’s three times the size of our studio!”
Among the people he worked into his epic historical work, a genre he gained fame working in before leaving China in 1985, were the local gallery owners he’s worked with, James Cox and Tom Fletcher (the latter seen from the back at the main table), along with other friends… and several native Americans pulled from the early photos of Edward S. Curtis.
Hongnian added that he was in China, into the coming month, to complete another major painting…a 16 ½ foot x10 foot depiction of the silk road, being completed on the campus of the new Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts, where he is also teaching courses.
What does he have planned for the big feast day come Thursday?
“Lois is hosting Thanksgiving for us,” he said. “But I will be there by Skype. They’ll be having dinner as I’m having breakfast…”
Now there’s a painting.
Paul Smart
