Daily Inspiration: Meet Shiqing Deng

Today we’d like to introduce you to Shiqing Deng. 

Hi Shiqing, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I grow up in China, as a child, I loved early Disney animation. I loved the idea of creating your own world, where everything looks just like you want it to. That’s when I decided to be an artist in the future. Now I am a professional artist based in New York. 

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
To be a professional artist is never easy, I wanted to only focus on my work without any other distractions, like financial pressure and art market. Most of artist I know also have the same issues, they normally have a part-time job in order to support their art. So, it’s a very challenging profession. 

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My work is influenced by the technique of Van Dyke and the dark humor from my personality. Each painting is about a particular story, I find these stories in many places. Sometimes they come from the news, more often, the stories in my paintings are personal. Making paintings is a lonely experience. I work most of the time and don’t see many people, so I love hearing about my friends’ social lives. I feel like I get to live through their gossip. Sometimes I invent stories to explore questions I have about society. I like how in both Old Master paintings and in cartoons, people’s clothes say so much about their personalities. I invent and design all the clothes in my paintings to help tell people’s stories. A lot of people associate painting in an Old Master style with serious paintings about ‘heroic men’. I like using my skills to tell strange and very personal stories from my feminine perspective. 

What was your favorite childhood memory?
My father is a librarian. He used to let me hide in the back of his library and paint from books on Vermeer, Van Dyke, and Holbein, that’s how I started learning Painting. So, every weekend I was at library doing my homework, talking and playing with my father’s colleagues, and see a lot of American magazines, which I couldn’t see in other places around that time in China, like vogue, entertainment weekly. So that experience is very valuable to me, even though I never actually read one book, but every time I smell the scent of the book, that memory came to me. 

Contact Info:

• Website: dengshiqing.com