The Process

Hong Kong vistas are often long and narrow. looked at, from or in between high rise buildings. With Chinese Scroll paintings in mind. Drawn on rolled and concertinaed paper from two hotel rooms at dawn, a side street on De Voeux Road West and with a coffee, watching trams  chunking along Johnston  Road from the balcony of the old Wo Cheong Pawn shop in Wanchai.

As a lone traveller in China, armed with phrase and guide book, and no Chinese to speak of, I engaged in a lot of smiling, pointing and painting. Walking, pedalling watching and waiting. Few people spoke any English but were curious and hospitable. Some thought I must have been lonely!

Taken on my first boat trip along The Grand Canal this photo of an oarswoman radiating such a spontaneous smile, brings back how welcoming people were to this stranger. Always intrigued by that characteristic rowing movement, pushing and stirring with the grace and energy of Tai Chi.

Smartly dressed in the local traditional blue costumes of country women, no doubt on their way to a waterside market to sell their produce.

These markets alongside old stone bridges were busy places where everybody would meet trade and hang around. Watching barges, boats, bodies and bikes. I loved these places. A few of the bridges are preserved in the water towns but these focal points for local communities have been replaced with wide roads and roundabouts, over and underpasses. It is called ‘development’.

In Tiantan Park, Beijing, every morning, among the shrubbery, under trees, along pathways, in pavilions, next to the red walls people gather to exercise, play music and hang out. In 1987 on my first morning in Hangzhou I climbed Wu Hill, walking backwards with the ladies, to where elderly comrades in blue gathered with caged birds, clutching jam jars of warm tea. Since then, warmed by this early morning socialising and exercising I will search it out in those tranquil settings by water or in parks to start my day.

I can never anticipate what it is that will captivate me and lead to a drawing. Sometimes even invited to join in with the musicians, dancers or water calligraphers.

One thing leads to another, if I let it!

At the end of the zig zag path, across a golden carp filled pond, lights glimmer through the carved wooden shutters of the fairytale Huxinting Teahouse. The faint strains of erhu and dizi invite me up the rickety stairs for tunes, tea and quails eggs. Many a dusty day in Shanghai has ended here. Wrapped up in the music and my drawing I would outstay the other tea drinkers until the instruments returned to their cases and perhaps the flautist enhanced my drawing with a poem. One thing leads to another!

In Suzhou, an expensive cup of tea was often accompanied by a storytelling Pingtan duo or a matinee theatre performance with old comrades. Intrigued by this art form I spent a morning at The Suzhou Pingtan school for young Pingtan musicians and sat with them in their classrooms.

A subsequent series of paintings commissioned for Standard Chartered Bank’s 150th anniversary year in China depicted a pair of Pingtan musicians in front of my painting.

Trusted tools of a musician’s trade
companions on the road
struck plucked endlessly played
wood metal reed bones
where ears eyes and fingers meet
and maybe drone!

The four treasures of The Scholar’s Studio are the brush, inkstick, paper and inkstone. At the breakfast table my drawings are of several other Chinese treasures, juggled between bowl and fingers?

In action

As a foreigner, an outsider, I am immediately noticeable but want to be an invisible onlooker. So I stick around, settle in with paints and paper and hope to become just another bit of the days entertainment. I can either charge around looking for things or sit still and wait for them to come to me. They do. Stay still, see it all, like a fly on the wall, wait for the buzz!

Hong Cun

On seeing my paintings of China exhibited in London 1997 the writer, Sun Shuyun, having researched locations for the film “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” put me on the trail of ancient towns in Yi and She Counties in Anhui Province. A few months later I had the now famous pond at Hong Cun to myself. Here, among the whitewashed Hui buildings, I made friends with the walls.

Xitang

The flaking white walls in the narrow passageways of Xitang, engraved by the handlebars of bicycles, the canopies of trishaws, cracked and peeling render revealing bricks, layers of history , the side drop of people and life squeezing by.

Walls that I had rubbed shoulders with on the way to my shuttered room overlooking Shin Bone Alley re-surfaced in my Chinese ink and Ceramic Paintings. A jovial erhu player was happy to perform in front of a particularly melodic wall of bricks. I am with my drawing of the smartest Hui style restored building in Xitang – the public lavatories!

Likeng

In Likeng while with art students and thieir professors, Mang Li and Zhang Peng, with whom I had been exhibiting previously in Shenyang, I took a break from painting the Huizhou architecture and wheelbarrows to make an ink rubbing of a crumbling back street wall.

Chinese wooden wheelbarrows are, to me, Working Sculpture. Taking a break from painting one, I picked my way through an overgrown nearby garden to inspect a climbing loofah plant, trailing tendril shadows across a sunlit wall. My sort of subject. I took several snaps and went back to the wheelbarrow.

Five years later, I painted the loofahs.

Zhaji

In 2017, with a group of artist professors and student from Shenyang, in 2017 I enjoyed what was for me a rare opportunity to use oil paints in China. From peaceful roof tops mapping the shape of Zhaji Ancient Village, in narrow back alleys against brick walls and alongside the brook with the ducks and women washing plates.

For a week the changing colours of a building facade backdrop, next to my hostel, fascinated me as I drew workers scaling the scaffolding to render and paint, as though demonstrating Tai Chi movements with their trowels and brushes.

I spent three mornings at another perfect location under cover overlooking a sort of piazza at a pathway junction, where two carpenters were adding an architrave to an old property. Curious locals watched them working, as I did, and my painting became a theatre stage set to which I added passing actors, including finally a three legged dog. My painting became a sort of diary of changing light and passing people. I enquired about the tools used in the building construction in particular a measuring device that I have often seen used by textile printers, masons and builders alike. The friendly carpenter told me that his was passed on to him by his father. When it started to rain I was invited up onto the roof to paint under cover.

One thing leads to another!

The wooden and metal winnowing machine is for me a sort of emblem of rural Chinese life along with the wooden wheelbarrow. Both an efficient piece of engineering and a statuesque sculptural object of beauty whether in action or parked up in the shadows.

My day at Caoshan started in the kitchen, drawing the nuns preparing breakfast. My young acupuncture student guide, and companion for the week, would then join me for breakfast with the nuns. Mornings shared between exploring the surrounding countryside and villages with my guide, occasionally meeting the locals, then back to drawing food preparation in the kitchen before 11.00 lunch. The nuns then fasted till breakfast.

Painting and exploring again in the afternoon light. One evening spent with nuns in their artroom I drew them in silence as they worked on copies of Buddhist paintings. One evening I joined the meditation group marching in circles and sitting cross legged. Another sitting, more comfortably on the temple steps with the some of the resident children singing in the moonlight!

Whilst President Of The Royal Watercolour Society between 2009 and 2012 I wrote creative ramblings for The Artists and Illustrators magazine based on my thoughts and topical activities as a working artist. They were called A Splash of Colour. In 2010/11, building up to an exhibition RWS members worked on paintings associated with musical events held at The Royal Albert Hall. One of my themes was the performance of Cinderella on Ice and the other The UK Brass Band Championships, when I spent time painting and drawing the assorted uniformed bandspeople with their instruments as they prepared to go on stage. Read some of the original articles in my blog here in the Artists and Illustrators category.