Fang Norwood (b. 1968, Beijing, China) is a self-taught artist living in the greater Philadelphia area. She has had impaired vision from a medical condition in one eye since she was 22, and suffered a traumatic brain injury resulting in impaired memory when she was 30. She has an academic linguistics background, and after long years of recovering has recently resumed her language teaching profession. As a person and as an artist, she believes in and has found meaning, wholeness, and poetry in both life and painting.

In her practice, Fang works mainly with acrylic and oil. She likes to experiment with the physicality of the medium during the painting process, and her color palette often pulses with the natural seasons. For preparation, she regularly attends local life figure drawing sessions–croquis in particular–and captures moments of essence and presence with decisive marks. On canvas through gestural forms, she explores color intensity and transparency, line quality in composition, and degree of abstraction, until a sense of simplicity, clarity, and balance happens between color or textured planes. Through each visual expression, she aims to create a contemplative mood and share a quiet inner moment.

To Fang, the act of painting is personal visual pondering: it is to wonder, to investigate, to sit and dance with the inner self; the painting surface is the recording of time, energy, traces of attention and intention; the created image is a glimpse into otherwise intangible inner space. She believes each of us has a unique internal world. She hopes the expressions of this world can evoke resonance in some others.