Original Art Stories - Xueling Zou

Good news to share for the coming up holidays, my figurative oil painting "Diary of Venus" won the 1st place in oil, juried by Pancho Jimenez at Great Bay Area Open (GBAO) "Potentiality/Actuality" biennial exhibition in the NUMU museum Los Gatos. There are many great works created by Bay Area based artists and the exhibition is open to the public at NUMU museum in Los Gatos until March 9 2024. I took a break from painting outdoors after Capitola Plein Air event. Of course I still paint at my home studio. Gorgeous day here in winter, it looked like fall. Though it was only 59 degrees, I felt warm in the sun. All foliage showing autumn leaf colors like yellow, orange, red, purple, and brown, which contrasted the blue sky and other plants of green were everywhere. It was great to go out and paint a day before the rainy season starts. Drove to Sunnyvale and the Heritage Park Orchard jumped into my mind. I think it is always inspiring when I drive on streets named af

Went to the Sunnyvale Heritage Park orchard, it is always fun to drive through the local streets, those are named with some of the greatest visual artists and musicians in  history. Robbia, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Manet, Monet, Matisse, Picasso, Rousseau, Sargent, Romberg; Mozart, Choppin, Puccini, Offenbach, etc.. What a great way to be inspired and review history. Two years ago I painted here, while the workers were drying apricots. It looked like they were working on the apricots today. And I found out the barn was more appealing today after reading the sign on the wall: " The Bianchi Bros. barn was constructed circa 1918 on Capitol Ave and Hostetter Road in San Jose and has been in continuous use since that time. It is a good example of the classic American barn with its unpretentious vernacular architecture. Barns are one of a rare handful of symbols that immediately evoke our national heritage and their honesty provides a strong regional identity to our agricultural p

The Sunnyvale Heritage Park Museum is adjacent to the 10 acre Orchard Heritage Park where about 800 trees were laden with ripe delicious Blenheim apricots. I didn't know this lovely place until today. Seemed that there was a big harvest of apricots, there were a couple workers delivered buckets of apricots to the those were making dry apricot fruit by hands. It was very interesting watching the process while I was painting in the middle of Silicon Valley, hard to believe certain people still working in very traditional way here, like me in this high tech area. I must come back and paint again.