Moon Rise, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in.

While Sailing Along captures a vision of the keel dropping down into dark waters and rising again to froth and foam, and masts filled with curving sheets pregnant with the big winds, Liang prefers the tranquility of twilight. He confesses, “I can’t sail. In the last couple of weeks when I was participating in the Newport Beach premiere organized by the Huse Skelly Gallery, one day, the owner of the gallery had a beautiful boat, about 50-feet long, and invited all the artists, about ten [of us], to go sailing...I thought we would go around the harbor, but we went out to the ocean and I was really seasick.” The rougher waters of the sea are forbidden territory to him—most of his recent paintings are reveries imagined from the shore. He creates plein air studies, but expands these little paintings in his 450-square-foot home studio, where he reconsiders what he has seen, shaping and rebuilding his paintings from his memories of sense and scene. 

Sailing Along, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in.

In Sunset Sailing in Newport Beach, he gazes serenely at the calm and quiet moments felt most strongly after the thrills of soaring over milky swells and sliding between the waves’ glassy swoops and drops are past. This is a benevolent painting of the spent and quieting hour of an ending day as sails begin to flap and sag, and our boogie bowsprits are relieved of bearing the snap and crack of the windswept spinnaker that swept happy crews into leisured pleasure, and the fading breeze brings boaters coasting back to homecoming and harbor and rest. The tides swell in the fall rhythm of evening, their keels borne to dock in the few and fragile moments before the sheets of blue night spread over the water in tired and reverent calm. 

Calvin Liang in his studio.

The sense of calm continues in Liang’s Fishing Boats in Santa Barbara Harbor, where rugged trawlers of the merchant fleet are tied to the sturdy cedar piles thrust into the seabed to create the docks of this sanctuary. They are painted in cadmium orange and pale cobalt yellow, their hulls stained and scumbled in the rusty hues of oxidized iron, earthy ochres and burnt sienna, as they float quietly beneath pink hints of sunset-tinted wisps of cloud in the Californian sky, an expanse split by a tangle of tight cabled masts, and knuckle booms and jib cranes cutting the pastel blue, all reflected in the broken water behind the break. No figures disturb the scene, but evidence of the dawn labor of fishermen is present. While lit in twilight, their working boats transmute into a picturesque evening image. Liang is a master of the subtleties of the enchanted light of gilded sunsets cast over steely and delicate blues, and of balancing the smooth planes and shapes of steel-hulled ships with flat-brushed strokes, scattering their reflections in the water’s mirrored broken surface. 

Fishing Boats in Santa Barbara Harbor, oil on canvas, 18 х 24 in.

Liang’s first two decades were spent in Canton, China, three hours away from Hong Kong, where he studied to be a set designer. This background is a key to his dramatic imaginings of the landscape, lit in the filtered colors of the stage. When an opportunity came to move to the United States as China moved toward openness after the long Cold War, Liang migrated to San Francisco to study at the Academy of Art College, and soon found work with Disney, painting digital backgrounds for the Little Mermaid, then Nickelodeon’s Spongebob Squarepants series. He explains, “At the time, every painting I sent to the gallery sold, and I couldn’t handle the gallery and animation, that’s why in 2002 I got to quit the job in animation [and] do the fine art I’m doing now.” He has no regrets leaving the stability of the animation business. He says, “You cannot put your heart into an idea for a painting for Spongebob, because everybody’s got to follow the script, follow the writer’s ideas. But when I do the fine art by myself, I can do what I want, I can put a 100 percent of my ideas, that’s why I enjoy myself right now.” Liang is living the American Dream.

Sunset Sailing in Newport Beach, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in.

The calm patience and kindness of his paintings are reflections of his gentle personality, and these traits have made him a popular workshop leader. He says, “In Kansas I teach a workshop in Rich Brimer’s studio, two days indoor, two days outdoor…I learn a lot when I’m teaching the workshops…I tell the fundamental, basic structure for the painting, how to make it…and when I’m talking to the people and I see the people working I critique the paintings reminding me of the premier painting structure, how to create a beautiful painting. …China is totally different for the landscape, for the seascape. Asia is totally different than America. So, when I teach a workshop, I tell the people if you paint the landscape, the still life, the figure, remember the four elements—shape, color, value, edges. It doesn’t matter what subject you paint…those are the elements, like in music: ‘do, re, mi, fah, so.’ Painting is the same thing—it doesn’t matter if it’s a seascape, or a tipi, a Native American, a sailboat, the wave, the rock, it’s still the shape, color, value and edges.” 

A View from Newport Beach, oil on canvas, 20 x 30 in.

Moon Rise carries us to Carmel, on the Monterey peninsula, where glowing palms bend toward the waxed moon, and the landscape bathes beneath her light. But although the blessings of the heavens wash the distant settlements, this is still a tough and weathered land, and Liang’s portraits remind us of the power of nature over our lives. It is a beautiful battle of ancient geology. Here are the rugged rocks of his Rocky Coast, Carmel, where the granite weight of the edge of the North American plate grinds over the Pacific, and the ocean erodes the rising cliffs. Tides and time meet in this holy place, where destination greets destiny. Generations of immigrant settlers built the cities of modern America by crossing the deserts of the West to meet this coast, and in this image of the stone and splash and spray, the future of our storied country joins seamlessly with the span of history. 

Rocky Coast, Carmel, oil on canvas, 20 x 30 in.

The fall fades, and Liang is there as the sharp North winds of winter come cutting through the canyons toward the beaches carrying the scents of mesquite, musky skunk, and sometimes the edgy hints of fearsome wood-smoke from the forests. Resting boats are raised from soft water and suspended over hard land and covered and protected from elemental harm in drydocks. It is the last act, the hour for mulled wines and pumpkin pies, and sunset skies spreading over this great land of forests and fields, coasts and deserts. It is the candled season when old men and women spice their reminiscences while feeling winter’s pinches. This is the twilight of a generation, a time for passing on the memory and mood of digger days to youth, when for a moment peace meant more than a word, and the heritage of liberty was fresh. It is the season to transfer the precious treasure of the past to the children of the future. No melancholy should stain the individual life of that bright and everlasting freedom. In A View from Newport Beach, Liang takes a stand celebrating Independence Day in his new homeland, painting a scene set in the Orange County harbor as a dry and heated Santa Ana wind sweeps beneath a cerulean sky to bend a huge and rippling Old Glory dominating a composition punctuated by flags laid in brisk dashes, the fluttering colors of our celebrated stars and stripes tied in a patriotic pyramid to the rigging of sailboats, spangled reminders of the burden of freedom borne by the brave. —

Newport Beach Sunset, oil on canvas, 20 x 30 in.

Michael Pearce is a dynamic writer, curator and critic, and a champion of art that emerges from popular culture and shapes the spirit of the age. He has published dozens of articles about art and artists, and is author of Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde.