Artist builds bridge with watercolors

A street view in Beijing.

Salminen got his first look at the real China.

"I couldn’t believe it, the amount of building and construction was unlike anything I was seeing here in the US and the architecture, the skyscrapers, all of the construction was absolutely amazing and mixed in the entire scene on the street level with all the little shops and all the merchants, all the people. It’s almost like two worlds coming together into one space that I found fascinating," Salminen said.

Salminen and his wife, who is a photographer, went two weeks before the day of the award presentation and spent a lot of time on their own walking all over Shanghai recording life and activities on the streets with their cameras.

"We really enjoyed wandering in the alleys, seeing life going on probably the same way it’s been going on for generations," he said.

Since then Salminen has been invited to many international exhibitions in Hangzhou, Beijing, Nanjing, Lushan, Lijiang and Shanghai.

In Beijing, he stayed in Hutong hotel, riding bicycles and just hanging out; he climbed Lushan Mountain and visited small villages in the area; in Lijiang, he enjoyed the beauty of the Li River and the vitality of the ancient city.

"China is such a beautiful country, I would hate to pick a favorite because we have so many favorites," said Salminen. "Shanghai was my initial introduction to Chinese subject maters, we have been back six times, and I continued to find its very interesting and fascinating subjects."

Salminen said the challenging part of his creative process is to turn a photograph into a painting, since the two media are two totally different aesthetics.

"My job as a painter is to reintroduce painting elements into the process rather than just simply reproducing larger versions of the photographs," he said.

"The photographs are disappointing. They don’t appear as I saw the scene when I was there, because when you were there, your emotions made the color you see in your memory unseen in the photograph," Salminen said. "So the photograph is just a starting point, but with far from enough information to create a painting. I need to reintroduce the atmosphere, the drama, the life quality into the painting. "