Pham Luc, born in 1943, was a soldier-painter and major in the Vietnam People’s Army. He fought in the American War armed with brushes, paint and an easel to capture what he observed. In 1977, he graduated from the Hanoi Fine Arts College. He creates rich oil paintings and lacquerware panels. He is a member of the Vietnam Fine Arts Association and his works have been collected by the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum in Hanoi. He has been exhibited in Vietnam, Russia, Japan, France, Italy, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
He has painted since the age of 17 and was able to continue painting during the American War despite the scarcity of paint, brushes and canvas. When the canvas was unavailable he continued to paint on burlap rice sacks at an uninterrupted pace. The paintings from the war are rat-eaten and shrapnel-ridden but embody an irrepressible spirit. They are darker in composition and content than his later works, which are equally fine. Pham Luc hid the work for over a decade before he could display it.
