How Kyle Ma’s paintings reveal the poetry of ordinary life — and his fresh voice in contemporary realism, balancing technique, emotion, and design.
The following article features a leading artist who is teaching others how to paint through online workshops at PaintTube.tv. Get your copy of “Kyle Ma: Painting Roses” here.
Contemporary Realism Artists Today: Kyle Ma
By Thomas Connors
In the 17th century, landscape and still life couldn’t hold a candle to history painting. In his hierarchy of art, the architect and theoretician André Félibien went so far as to assert, “The artist who does perfect landscapes is superior to another who paints only fruit, flowers, or shells. The artist who paints living animals deserves more respect than those who represent only still, lifeless subjects. And as the human figure is God’s most perfect work on earth, it is certainly the case that the artist who imitates God by painting human figures is more outstanding by far than all the others.” Although Dutch collectors would have disagreed (they also appreciated genre scenes of peasants dancing), such thinking endured into the early 20th century.
In any atelier where representation still holds sway, the figure may remain non plus ultra — at least as far as demonstrating technical prowess is concerned — but the moral element embedded in such masterworks as Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1851) is, for the most part, a thing of the past. As for landscape and still life, where philosophical or metaphorical intentions once prevailed, it is formal issues and pure visual delight that now draw most viewers to these genres. We seek out appealing subject matter, of course, but no matter what the content, our pleasure is heavily dependent on effective orchestration of the composition, and on skillful deployment of color and light.
Now 25, the Austin-based artist Kyle Ma (b. 2000) has spent almost a decade demonstrating an assured facility in this regard, a sympathy for both scene and incident as well as a commitment to making the inconsequential consequent.
An International Life
Born in Taiwan, Ma moved with his family to Austin in 2010. By then, he had already demonstrated a keen interest in drawing. He recalls, “I liked to draw as soon as I could hold a pencil, and while my parents didn’t introduce me to art themselves, I found myself drawn to a book about Claude Monet they owned. I spent much of my childhood trying to replicate the pieces in it, using whatever materials I could get, such as crayons or watercolors. My parents saw my interest and talent, so they would take me to museum shows. While there were no major art museums in Taipei, I was fortunate to see some great temporary exhibitions of artists like Velázquez, Rubens, Millet, and Monet.”
Once in the U.S., Ma took his first steps toward formal instruction, studying with artist and longtime Austin educator Elizabeth Locke. “I started to learn the fundamentals of painting seriously,” says Ma. Locke “emphasized the importance of working from life, and introduced me to the work of modern-day artists such as Richard Schmid, Quang Ho, and Michael Lynch. Before, I thought representational art was no longer relevant. With her, I saw that art could be a viable career path.”
As a teen, Ma attended workshops conducted by Quang Ho, who was impressed with the young man’s skill. “Just a few years later,” recalls Ho, whose own contemporary realism work encompasses landscape, still life, interiors, and figures, “I saw a painting he had posted on Facebook and realized that he had fully grown into a top-tier artist. It is not so much his technique or particular ways of handling brushwork, but rather his ability to see values and colors so well.”
Like many creative individuals before him, Ma hedged his bets before committing to the artistic life, opting to earn a B.S. in geology from the University of Texas at Austin. “I thought about studying at an art school or atelier,” he explains. “However, after discussing this with my family, they felt it was better to get a college degree in another field as a backup plan.” While still a student, Ma had his first solo show at the Wilcox Gallery in Jackson, Wyoming, an experience that bolstered his determination to pursue a career as an artist. Since then he has exhibited widely and earned several awards, including a gold medal in the 2021 national juried show of the Oil Painters of America. And in 2025, he won the PleinAir Salon Grand Prize.
Ma expresses particular admiration for the Russian landscape painter Isaac Levitan (1860–1900), whose work, he suggests, “is not only brilliant technically, but also shows a deep connection with his subject.” Ma’s dedication to landscape, which forms a major part of his output, includes vast Western vistas, many of which are developed in plein air.
“When I go outdoors, I start by toning the canvas gray, then I sketch in some lines with a brush for placement before blocking in the colors,” Ma shares. “I typically spend about one to two hours on location painting. After I get back to the studio, I look through my plein air studies and photos, then I create some pencil sketches and color sketches with ideas for larger works. When I work on location, my focus is capturing the overall feeling of the place by recording accurate shapes and colors. In the studio, I tend to change things to fit my own vision, and my process there involves much more trial and error to get the composition, color harmony, and value structure exactly the way I envision, not always how they appeared in nature.”
Ma’s contemporary realism renderings of the Western landscape include views of Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and the California coast. These range from long vistas of vast expanses of deeply incised earth all the way to on-the-ground scenes where the golden leaves of a single tree are reflected in a shallow stream.
The artist stakes out a middle ground, too, as in “Evening Storms at Vermillion Cliffs,” where the not-too-distant, brown and ochre wall of a fortress-like formation catches the sun, even as dark clouds roll in above. There is a wonderfully fractured quality to Ma’s depiction of Perkins Point in Pacific Grove, California, where the crashing sea and sun-touched cliffs are defined with almost blade-like brushstrokes. In “Morning at Dead Horse Point,” the paint appears pressed into the canvas and the image — executed in a palette that ranges from brown to blue and purple — can be appreciated as a study in color as much as a view of nature.
As an animalier, Ma has depicted goats, chickens, and even a llama, but it is cows (also beloved by the 19th-century master Rosa Bonheur) that make his finest breathing subjects. Neither as lovable as a dog, nor as impressive as a steed, a cow, in many ways, just is, and Ma truly captures that blend of curiosity and indifference this animal projects, standing its ground, its hide nearly aglow in the sun.
When it comes to contemporary realism still life, Ma often turns to flowers, pairing yellow roses, for example, with a brass clock. He cites “Roses,” painted in 1890 by Abbott Handerson Thayer, as an inspiration. At first glance, the latter, now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, appears monochromatic and uneventful, but Ma finds much to appreciate: “It’s the subtlety of that painting that inspires me. When I saw it in person in Washington, D.C., I went up close to admire all the color and value transitions in the petals. It’s a painting that rewards you for looking closer. Sometimes, with certain paintings, I’m drawn to the design from afar, but as I look closer, I become dissatisfied with the technique or lack of sensitivity in how the subject is handled. In Thayer’s piece, I feel the opposite.”
Beyond his penchant for the bucolic and the wild, fruits and flowers, and picturesque European streetscapes, Ma possesses the openness to seize on the least likely candidates for subject matter. Real people doing real things have become so central to visual representation that, one could argue, the term genre painting has lost its original meaning. After all, we would no more classify Edward’s Hopper’s “Nighthawks” (1942) as a genre scene than we would call Willem de Kooning’s “Pirate (Untitled II)” a portrait.
But there are in Ma’s oeuvre singular images that suggest genre painting redux. “Workers in New York,” for example, depicts a pair of men opening a manhole in a Manhattan crosswalk, while “Noon at Newark Airport” shows orange-vested workers on the tarmac as a jet taxis in. “I’ve learned,” Ma notes, “that with a good sense of design, it’s possible to make subjects that seem ordinary become a profound visual experience.”
“Every painting is unique in what I wish to explore,” Ma explains, “but if there is an overarching idea, it’s that I like to describe places and things that reflect my own experiences. I want to provide viewers with a work of art they can keep looking at and discover more and more interesting aspects within. Even though I’ve been painting most of my life, I feel that I’m barely scratching the surface of what’s possible in art. I’m excited to see how far I can take my work in my lifetime.”
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