China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Nobility and the art of being young
A bowl of noodles or a piece of cloth draped over a bicycle shed are the simple kinds of things that can get the creative juices flowing
eld high up against the sun, the violet bead of grape melts into a purple sea”. Guan Yanfei wrote the lines whenshe was 12, for the thick album of paintings published inmemory of art, in the way she sawit, as her first love.
Two years have passed since then. Today Yanfei is still fond of using sunlight as a metaphor, in an effort to describe the thrill and enchantment of a creative process, feelings that are almost beyond words.
“I felt like water, blended with the oil that was my paint,” she says. “Together we rolled down the canvass in large drops, reflective of the sunlight that fills the room.”
Indeed, oil is her favorite medium, as the collection of her lightsoaked works demonstrate. The colors are heaped onto the canvass, probably by a paint knife, to create a matte surface full of tension, texture and a creative maelstrom. In short, they are mood paintings.
And it is this mood-recording process of art making that Wang Wei, founder of Color Edu, is determined to show to his young students. “Strokes and sentiments — they are inseparable,” says the 34-year-old, who founded his own children’s art education center after spending a decade in the industry.
“I chose gouache for my youngest students — four or five-year-olds — instead of the more commonly used watercolor or Chinese ink because gouache is less free-flowing and so is easier to control for a child. Its quality also means that it is more capable of documenting the entire creative process than many other media. Every stroke and every dab is visible from the final work, even those first painted and later regretted. I want the connection between a child and what he or she paints to be more visceral and palpable. In this way the child learns to express him or herself throughart.” (The oil classes areavailable for children aged 8 and above.)
Expressing oneself
Wang Lijuan, an art studentturnedart educator, says that as a child she found it hard to express herself through just one channel.
“Painting of course was something I’m really interested in,” says Wang Lijuan, whose engineer father also passed on to her the fervor for handiwork.
“But at the same time I was also fond of singing and taking part in school plays. My father helped me make things using wooden planks and an electric drill.”
Two decades later Wang introduced wooden planks and electric drills to her class, for her teenage students who together built a bridge at the center’ssummercampin Beijing.
At her place, students adopt a multidisciplinary approach to studying art, an approach that, Wang Lijuan says, “engages all of a child’s senses and speaks for who he or she is”.
“Theartwemakemustreflectwho we are. In other words it’s the whole you, as opposed to part of you, that must go into whatever you make.”
In one class, students, after being From left:
An oil painting by Guan Yanfei, a Color student; Guan Yanfei invites light into her paintings; beef noodles by Wu Yilin, who has a passion for food.