Quang Ho

In 1975, at age 11, Quang Ho fled Saigon with his mother, four brothers and three sisters, just one day before the city fell to Communist forces. A Denver, Colorado couple later sponsored Ho and his family with the First Reformed Church who assisted in the penniless family's resettlement there. With little knowledge of English, the family began the arduous task of assimilation and survival in a strange-but-safe-land.

Ho received a scholarship to the Colorado Institute of Art and credits his later development in oils to mentor Rene Bruhin who instructed him at the Institute. "Rene was my saving grace. He was a crusty, hard-driving professor who'd come up and say, 'What the hell are you doing?' He could solve a problem with just a few strokes and taught me not only how to paint, but how a painting works: things like color notes and melody. Rhythm and the underlying structure of a painting were important to Bruhin, and he stressed that the real master of art expresses feeling rather than technique, which is achieved through intuition rather than education."

"Realism and abstract—it's all the same to me. The real essence of painting is the dialogue between shapes, tones, colors, textures, edges and line. Everything else follows—including light, form, concepts personal beliefs and inspirations. For me, painting is a marriage between the mastery of those 'basic visual elements; the discoveries and understanding of visual statements [the search for what is true on a personal level artistically; and the trust in ones own wordless intuition and inspiration. Understanding gives rise to higher understanding. Working this way allows me to open the door to new ideas and inspirations. One day I may be interested in a color statement, and the next may be a relationship of simple shapes, and the next an extremely complex arrangement of texture and edges...with every painting there is a singular visual thought to be completed."

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