Detroit, MI
Max and Louis Boyang are 10-year-old twin boys. Max paints and Louis draws. Acrylic canvases sketched by Max of a lakeside family vacation feel convincingly lush and summery. Dock plants, creek weeds and low forest grow verdant detail from the artist’s choice of different brush tips and stroke techniques. The scenes register picture perfect—they’re based on photographs. Louis’s field of sunflowers, intensely drawn in graphite straight from his mind, provides infinite places to get profitably lost. Hundreds of tiny seeds crowd the center of each flower, thousands of lines edge the tips of their petals and the veins of their leaves, even more crowd the shadowy spaces in between. Close looking is akin to being an insect or a bee. Aside from a loosely shared subject matter of the natural world, Max and Louis have something else in common: foliage is their strength, skies an afterthought. Some artists look down, others look up, but best is to look all around.
—Lori Waxman 11/29/15 12:00 PM