When taking up a brush to paint, most of us think that this is the first time reality is depicted as such and we are doing pioneering work. That is precisely the artist’s pride: defying all kinds of reasons and the obstacles set up by the master painters, he wants he picture to be dissimilar to any other one and quite unique to him. Thus, generations of artists follow one another, one painter tries to outdo the other and new things continuously emerge: facts are limited in number but their expression is extremely diversified, multiform, and boundless so to speak.

This artist has got rural life in his blood, and nothing could change it, despite his roaming life in years of toil when on many occasions he had to “forget” art in favour of making shop signs for  his living. At times, he is keen on a bit of fancy and coquetry. But it may be said that his plain innocence in terms of savoir vivre, casualness in his behaviour and the perceptiveness shaped by the village culture with a liking for morality have moulded the spirit of Hoang Bach Diep’s paintings. Hence they are at the same time coarse and refined, worldly and dreamlike, sensual, and immaculate. Everything seems to be available from nature: lotus ponds, grass and flowers, cats and dogs, birds, …and even their purity and greenness seem to go to the painting quite naturally. Scenes of ordinary life, viz. a mother holding her baby in her arm, children amusing themselves, males and females billing and cooing, bathing in the nude or being stripped to the waist whether being distorted or kept intact, are also given access to the painting and fit in well with it.

There is something here which is artistically similar to the sculpture of village communal houses and folk pictures wherein art instantly merges into life and expression rather than selection matters and the artist does not hesitate to admit his ugliness while trying to paint a beautiful picture.

According to this painting style, the proportion of shapes and figures when confronted with reality does not make sense. The latter are integrated into painting, guided by the artist’s in situ, direct impressions and then linked with an interesting, humoristic spirit to raise above the toil and moil, the innate misery of human existence or the intricacies of an amorous man. Shades or tender green or light pink in the picture appear to come directly from the scenery and objects of Kinh Bac region to create an expressionistic in lieu of a descriptive space overwhelmingly filled with amorous lovers as if resulting from an echo of Quan Ho folk songs.

Art Critic Phan Cam Thuong