icuong

Cuong Nguyen


San Jose, CA, USA
About

Trained to be a traditional portraitist at the age of 10 in his native Vietnam, Cuong has always had a passion for drawing human faces. He finds the natural beauty in the people that surround him—from the men and women he painted to earn money on the streets of Saigon as a child, to the denizens of Silicon Valley that he often paints today. Faces inspire him—so much so that that he has been known to approach strangers to request that they model for him.
Cuong has won several awards for his painting, including Best in Show at the International Association of Pastel Societies’ 15th Juried Exhibition and a Gold Medal at its 16th Juried Exhibition. The artist is a member of Oil Painters of America and the International Guild of Realism and is a Distinguished Pastelist in the Pastel Society of the West Coast.
Cuong won the Pastel Journal Grand Prize Award for 2011 with the painting Spring.