Renowned for his colorful celebrations of beauty, Walasse Ting infuses all his artwork with an indomitable joie de vivre. Both his artwork and poetry—as with the comedic self-reflection above—display the artist’s playful celebration of life and his hedonistic enjoyment of aesthetics and gratification. Ting’s involvement and association with modern artistic movements in Paris and New York provided the artist with an array of influences, allowing him to form his own unique and distinctive style.

In Picnic, the vibrant hues recall Fauvist influences, as Ting evokes the provocative and modernist spirit of the movement through the flamboyantly vivid colors which interact to create a bold symphony which plays across the four panels. In this piece, the pertinence of Ting’s self-assigned moniker “Flower Pirate” becomes readily apparent, as a variety of sumptuous blooms sweep across each of the panels in a delightful display of elegant decadence. A standard theme in Ting’s paintings, flowers represent female beauty to the artist. Ting often depicts sensual nudes engulfed in blossoms, enhancing the correlation in his work between the delicacy of feminine grace and the ephemeral splendor of the flowers. In a poem, Ting once wrote, “Love, resembling a butterfly when it comes, and a flower on paper when it goes.” Ting’s flowers signify the artist’s love for life’s pleasures, which Picnic epitomizes in a riotous celebration of effervescent color.

Many of Ting’s paintings display his overt sexuality and delight in erotic indulgence. In Picnic, Ting has taken a more subtle approach to his presentation of sensual symbolism. Strewn across the soft blue table, Ting’s plump peaches echo the voluptuous nudes which decorate the paintings arrayed along the background. The gentle pink of the fruit evokes the impression of an unclothed woman, reclined along the blue wash of the table. Amidst the rolling curves of fruit sits a brightly lit birdcage. The small, brilliantly colored birds sit along the same perch, but gaze at each other from across the division of two panels. Although sharing the same cage, they do not occupy the same space, establishing both harmony and tension within the continuum of the piece as a whole.

Along the backdrop, Ting presents in Picnic an encompassing glimpse of his artistic oeuvre. Important subjects and themes are prominently displayed across the four panels, providing the viewer with a full understanding of Ting’s influences and passions. Recurring often throughout the span of Ting’s artistic career, horses and women have provided the artist with a continuous source of inspiration. These two subjects represent the juxtaposition of both the Western modern movements in which Ting participated, as seen through the nudes, along with the influences of Chinese ink painting, where horses have traditionally occupied a dominant thematic position. Ting grants these two examples of artistic influences prominence in Picnic, as they form the primary focus on the flanking panels. These works place all other examples of the artist’s inspirations—birds, insects, fish, and other natural elements—into the context of Ting’s artistic span of expression.

Ting’s inspiration in painting comes from the world around him, as his themes focus on the natural beauty of life’s pleasures. When painting, says Ting, “you just want to wait until your blood courses quickly through your veins, and you can only see the image but not the rush; you can just see the world, not the painting; you just see love but not yourself.” Ting’s Picnic clearly exhibits this passion and rapture for life, endemic to the artist’s signature luminous aesthetic, and stands as an opulent celebration of all things beautiful.