About

Ling Zhang is a classical realist oil painter based in the United States. She began studying painting online in 2018. Since 2022, she has continued her study of classical oil painting online with James Sulkowski, focusing on traditional principles of light and form. Her work centers on still life, landscape, and quiet figurative scenes, with an emphasis on light as structure rather than decoration.

After years of painting objects and environments, she experienced a decisive shift in December, when light became the central organizing force of her work. Since then, her paintings have been built from darkness upward, allowing form, space, and stillness to emerge through controlled value and restrained color.

Her approach is rooted in classical oil painting principles, particularly the relationship between light, mass, and atmosphere. Rather than narrative emphasis, her paintings invite slow looking—where light defines presence, and silence becomes part of the composition.

Ling Zhang continues to develop a body of work that explores clarity, balance, and permanence through traditional oil painting methods.

“Light is not added—it is discovered.”