Esther Hong

The Museum salutes Esther Hong for teaching classes in Oriental watercolor painting at the Museum for over five years. She now has a dedicated following of teens, retirees, and professionals who take classes with her year in and year out. Her class steeps students in Asian aesthetic. Like many other Eastern disciplines, she takes her role as teacher very seriously. She purposefully keeps her class size small and does not want more than six students at one time. She develops a relationship with each student, and once they achieve a certain level of dedication and mastery she will give them a ‘chop’, a stamp an artist uses instead of a signature. The chop will either be their given name written in Korean script or a particular name she has chosen for that student.

Esther’s students consistently remark on how her class teaches them to quiet their minds and focus. Esther herself embodies the traditional Asian aesthetic of calm restraint. When Esther creates landscapes of Erie she will purposely leave out trees or other features. She says, “In Western painting people fill the whole thing with paint. It can look cluttered to us. But we can’t take out too much, the landscape still must be recognizable.” This active use of negative space requires the artist to employ great self-discipline.

Esther grew up in Korea and was encouraged and mentored by her art teachers in middle and high school. She went on to college and gained the equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree in painting and art education. She has lived in the United States since 1986 and in Erie since 2005. She has exhibited her work at the Erie Art Museum and at Auer Gallery.

Contact Museum Folk Art Coordinator, Kelly Armor for more information.