Artist builds bridge with watercolors

John Salminen painting in a village near the Lijiang River in Yunnan province, Southwest China.

John Salminen, a native Minnesota watercolorist, whose cityscape paintings — especially those of Chinese cities — have caught eye of Chinese art enthusiasts, told China Daily about his on-going connection with China.

A post entitled "Unbelievable beautiful watercolor painting by John Salminen" has been forwarded several times through Chinese social media platforms, gaining popularity.

"Amazing, his work is just like a sonata of lights and shades. Even the most trivial streetscape looks bright and vivid," a Chinese netizen wrote on the post, which is typical of most opinions.

What surprises Chinese netizens is that the painter is American born, first set foot in China in 2010 and can paint China's market places and streetscapes with such precision.

What surprises them even more is that he still lives with his wife in a self-built log cabin surrounded by the pine forests of Duluth, Minnesota.

"I don’t paint nature landscapes, because I’m around that every day, that does not seem unusual to me," Salminen said, adding that living in a natural environment made him different from "traditional" watercolor painters, who prefer painting nature scenes.

"But when I’m in a city, it’s exciting because it is very different from what I see every day," Salminen said.

Born in Minnesota in 1945, Salminen has spent most of his life in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

Graduating from the University of Minnesota with a master's in art in 1969, Salminen became a high school art teacher and taught for nearly 34 years.

He started painting watercolors in the 1970s after taking a course with Chinese-American painter Cheng-Khee Chee, an associate professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and a signature member of the National Watercolor Society, who has a style influenced by both East and West.

Salminen was inspired by his work. "Just like everyone else in that class, we all wanted to paint just like Chee. So I made a decision at that point that watercolor was something I’d like to pursue," he said.

"I realized if I was going to be a serious artist, I needed to strike out on my own in terms of subject and style," Salminen said.

Salminen initially started painting the harbor of Duluth, where there were a lot of ships coming and going.

He started depicting cityscapes after he and his wife visited New York City several years ago.

"I was just overwhelmed with the amount of detail, the amount of visual perfection," Salminen recalled.

From then on, Salminen followed the road of painting cityscapes and, thanks to his solid skills, soon achieved success.

"The thing about cityscapes is that it is a very open, in-depth subject, because you have a certain amount of nature, the curves with the city, the parks and of course you have people," he said.

Salminen said he's done a lot of paintings of New York City’s Central Park. "There is really a wide variety of subjects that fall within that category of urban scenes, so there are a lot of choices to paint," he added.

In 2010, Salminen was invited to Shanghai to receive an award in person at the Shanghai Zhujiajiao Watercolor Biennial Exhibition, billed as the largest watercolor exhibition of its kind in the world and opened for the first time to entries from outside China.