Created By
William Tong
Acrylic on canvas
Curator
Luke Chapman
"Wayfinding 2" continues the artistic exploration of industrial landscapes with a remarkable shift in emotional tenor from its companion piece. Where the previous work employed cool teals, this painting introduces a warm, almost nostalgic palette that transforms industrial architecture into something approaching the sublime. The rose-gold atmospheric treatment suggests either dawn or dusk—transitional moments when ordinary structures take on extraordinary qualities. This temporal ambiguity serves the painting's conceptual foundations, suggesting that our perception of industrial landscapes shifts with context and perspective. The golden navigational lines create visual pathways through the composition while simultaneously referencing lighthouse beacons, search lights, and perhaps even divine illumination—asking viewers to reconsider these utilitarian structures as potential sites of transcendence. What distinguishes this work is its sophisticated negotiation between documentary impulse and emotional response. The artist maintains the recognizable features of industrial architecture while elevating them through atmospheric treatment and compositional devices. This approach resists both naive romanticism and cynical critique, instead occupying a nuanced middle ground that acknowledges the complex legacy of industrialization. For collectors interested in contemporary landscape painting, "Wayfinding 2" offers an important meditation on how we navigate environments that are simultaneously human-made and beyond human scale. The work succeeds in finding unexpected beauty in utilitarian structures while acknowledging their cultural and environmental implications. Through this romantic-industrial aesthetic, the artist invites viewers to reconsider spaces typically overlooked in traditional landscape painting traditions.
"Wayfinding 2" presents an industrial landscape bathed in a soft, rosy atmosphere. The composition features a prominent industrial structure—cylindrical silos or storage tanks—rising from a misty urban environment rendered in monochromatic grays and blacks. Golden rays emanate outward from a central point, cutting through the composition like beacons or directional guides. The upper portion of the canvas transitions into a luminous pink and peach-toned sky, creating a stark contrast with the muted industrial forms below. The atmospheric quality of the painting gives the scene a dreamlike quality, with architectural elements appearing to emerge from and dissolve into layers of fog or haze. A small, indistinct vehicle or machinery form is visible at the bottom of the composition, grounding the otherwise ethereal scene in human activity. The painting combines precise geometric elements (the golden rays) with soft, painterly techniques that blur the boundaries between solid forms and atmospheric effects.
Created By
William Tong
150 x 100 cm | 59 x 39 in
2022
