Posted 5 months ago
Jade42
(70 items)
Hi!....This is a recent Thrift purchase .......Its a vintage P. Wong Junk Boat 20x 24 oil painting.....Ive been watching it for several months...it was marked down to $50 from $165......which I thought was really pricey for a Thrift store.....its in good condition....A beautiful night scene.
This is what I could find on the net:
In the mid-seventies these P Wong paintings were sold at the ever popular 'painting shows' much like candle shows and lingerie shows of today. Somebody write that in the seventies they also could be bought from Camrose Art Corp., located in New York.
We can only speculate that the P Wong paintings were actually mass produced in a warehouse somewhere in California as depicted on magazine shows such as 20-20 or 60 Minutes many years ago.
Attractive nocturne. Probably was mass produced, what I call sofa art, sized to fit on the wall over a sofa. P. Wong may, or may not, have been an actual person. Probably not. There were numerous fictitious artists during this period whose names appeared on mass produced art, i.e., Burnett, etc., some with extensive fictional biographies, like Robert Cox.
There were a lot of these painting factories in Mexico and the U.S., which were later replaced by factories in Hong Kong and Taiwan and finally in China where, the last time I checked, the bulk of sofa art comes from today. All produced generic paintings.
There were a couple of legit "Tupperware" themed USAS art "factories", like Personal Preference INC., which employed actual artists who produced unique works signed by the actual artists, but they were by far the minority of the sofa art scene and probably do not deserve that title. A few of those artists went on to become successful, well known artists.
At some point, not sure when, instead of people cranking out large quantities of sofa art paintings, someone figured out who to make machines that could mass produce oil and acrylic paintings. I was in a used furniture store one day a few years ago and came across a stack of maybe a dozen paintings which were identical. If I had come across just one of them, I would have assumed that it had been made in one of these factories, AKA sweat shops. This was after I stopped collecting so, not sure how prevalent that became.