As regular readers of this blog know, I reminisced, in a May 2019 post, about my acquisition of a lovely Chinese waterscape, in oil, by a Taipei artist called Peco Yeh, in 1968. And I showed a photo of the painting, which graces a wall in my house to this day, almost fifty-seven years later.

Then in July 2023, I heard from a woman named Earline Dirks, who had a Peco Yeh painting that she had acquired at Goodwill. The subject matter and style were much different from my painting of a boatman on the Tamsui, and different from other paintings by Peco that I saw in his studio shop on Jungshan North Road in Taipei near sixty years ago. Yet it clearly was an original by him, as attested by his distinctive signature. 

I posted a piece showing Earline’s painting, and mine, and speculating on this change of style. Since then I have received communications and photos from four other owners of Peco Yeh paintings— Joshua Lowe, Jane Upchurch, Michael Tomczyk, and Antonia Lonquist. All these proud owners generously agreed to let me share their paintings with you, as I have done in the posts hyperlinked immediately above.

The more of Peco’s paintings I have seen, the more I am impressed with his restless artistry, his constant grasping to experiment with and master a wide variety of styles, techniques, and subjects. I think if you look at all the paintings shown in these posts you are bound to agree. 

Now, from Gloucester, Massachusetts, comes Matt O’Connell, with the canvas below. 

I don’t know much about art, but to my eye this is a fairly spectacular example of Peco’s work. Unlike my canvas, and most of the others I have seen, this one is brilliantly polychromatic. A bright red ball of sun, sinking with surrealistic draftsmanship into a fiery sea, illuminates a few dark boats in the left foreground and a silhouetted fisherman tending one of them. The paint in most of the scene is applied in a blocky, chunky style, maybe with a palette knife. The fisherman and boats, on the other hand, are rendered rather minutely. The whole effect is dramatic. 

Forgive the funny look of the frame. The photo was a little off-center and I cropped it to show as little of the frame as possible without cutting out part of the canvas. 

Thanks, Matt, for sharing this. It gives us another window into the work of this enigmatic Chinese artist. 

Dear Reader, I don’t know whether or not Peco was a great artist, but the more of his images I see, the more I realize he was an interesting artist. This blog you are reading, with this post and the others I have linked above, may be the world’s largest collection of extant Peco Yeh paintings. And of all the owners of these canvases, I believe I am the only one who actually met and conversed with the artist in those long-ago days in the 1960s version of Taiwan. 

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

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