Development, Influence, Artistic Style
Le Minh Duc was born in 1981 and graduated from Vietnam University of Fine Arts in 2005, belongs to the generation of painters who were born and grew up in peace time and fully enjoyed the pleasure as well as the freedom and openness of creativity in Vietnamese art under Doi Moi after 1986.
Artist Le Minh Duc specializes in oil paintings with his favourite theme of houses and street landscapes, especially in the lanes of Hanoi in which he discovers their simple, silent, and specific artistic beauty. The poor and narrow alleys, quarters of ruinous and cheap apartment houses with mossy walls and uneven window frames or balconies, awry fences exposed to the sunlight, covered with flowers. In almost all of his paintings there are no people present. An open window, bicycles leaning against houses, clothes hanging outside to dry on a small balcony, and telephone and electrical cable indicate the existence of people.
Le Minh Duc paints houses, streets and flowers with his personal oil painting style. This is a rapid, direct and rushing technique with flat and wide brushstrokes, thick with paint, very dense and coarse. He draws like coating the picture with paint, playing with this medium on the canvas surface, using colours to construct figures and record feelings and impressions. Le Minh Duc has a limited range of colours he uses, cream, mauve, yellow, grey, black, blue, and white are the most important. He uses light and dark to give an almost three dimensional perspective to his objects.
It may be said that on the one hand French impressionism exerts certain lasting influences over Vietnamese art, but on the other hand, people could also say that it is the Vietnamese artists themselves who, with their individual talents, have “vietnamized” all the influences coming from abroad after the national aesthetic sense to unexpectedly create very characteristic imprints for Vietnamese painting in the general and the Vietnamese impressionistic school in particular.
Le Minh Duc`s works are currently being carried in galleries in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Dubai, London, Finland and Belgium.
