about me

Nguyen Tran

Visual artist

“Nguyen physical journey has taken him from Saigon to Saskatoon.  His artistic journey involves and joins two main impulses.

He has a strong urge to create physical works of art. He is intrigued by the technical skills of the old masters of the European figurative painting tradition and the equally impressive skills of generations of artisans who have created useful objects such as books and clothing.  These objects are, to him, no less beautiful or valuable for being useful than the paintings are.      

He also has a strong need to represent figures whose attributes come to him like characters in a story unfolding within him.  Each painting’s subject matter comes to him as unique to the moment of creation.  But the images when viewed together and in retrospect add to the story which his artistic life is telling. 

Each work presents its unique artistic challenges to him as he strives to grow technically as an artist.  And each work also contributes a new character or characters to the story which he can only discover as he tells it through his art. This story is unfolding slowly, its meaning growing clearer as more pieces are added to the puzzle.  But he is not expecting the journey to provide any final answers.

Perhaps the job of an artist is not to find any answers but to continue to find more questions.”