Painter makes life’s daily beauty her muse
Print Edition
Everything goes quiet when she sits there and starts to draw. As a peaceful feeling descends, her birds come out. When she puts down her brush, head tilted slightly to the left and her eyes looking to the right over her shoulder, it’s as if she could still feel her pair of pearl birds sitting on the back of her chair watching her.
“That’s my muse,” Wan Fu said. “I had them with me for 10 years. Though they are gone now, I can still hear them looking for me everywhere in the house.”
Wan, 54, is a famous elaborate-style painter of birds and flowers based in Shanghai. She had a solo exhibition last month at the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy. Sixty-five of her most recent works were displayed and well received by both the public and critics. Shi Dawei, deputy director of the China Artists Association, noted that “ ... this diligent and talented artist has such an eye for the details of the nature that brings traditional elaborate brushwork to a higher level in terms of colors and shades.”
In her paintings, you see birds and flowers magnified in such a vivid and detailed sense that it seems you had never seen or noticed them before — flowers dance in the mellow light and birds are kissed by shadows. She breaks away from the traditional tableau and rearranges her subjects, making them bolder by using warm and cold hues that she melds harmoniously.
Wan spent much of her early youth surrounded by nature. Her father served as an active-duty officer at a military base in Sichuan Province, where she was born. At age 4, she was sent to live with an aunt and other family members in Taixing in east China’s Jiangsu Province, where both of her parents were from. In her youth, she didn’t get to see her parents a lot. Alone and sensitive, she found birds and flowers her best company.
It wasn’t until her father retired and was transferred to Shanghai in the late 1970s that the family was reunited. Wan went to Shanghai Arts and Crafts Vocational College and started to learn painting. After four years of study, she graduated as an excellent student and was asked to stay on as a teacher of elaborate-style painting at the college.
Elaborate-style painting is an important genre of Chinese art, which strives to portray subjects as lifelike through detailed strokes and complicated dyeing skills. The painting tradition started in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and flourished in the Song Dynasty (960-1279).
“I like to work on birds and flowers,” Wan said. “It brings my childhood tranquility back to me.”
Her hard work finally bore fruit. Wan took part in the ink-painting project “A Harmonious China,” a popular animation show at the China Pavilion during the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.
In 2011, she was invited to the International Horticultural Expo in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province and drew 100 different types of flowers there. “Peonies, lilies, tulips, camellias, azaleas ... you name it,” Wan said, rubbing her eyes with her fingers. “It took me five months to complete all the flowers. My eyes hurt and I fell ill right after I came back to Shanghai.
“But I’ve never regretted it. Plants have a life, just like my birds and us human beings, and you have to catch them right. I watched them grow and bloom, bear fruit and wither and rot in the fields. Every phase of life comes to an end. But every end is also a new beginning.”
She said that next she wants to paint 100 species of birds to match with the 100 types of flowers she painted.
Today, Wan’s paintings have been exhibited and purchased by private collectors and organizations around the world. One of her paintings, “Magnolia and Pigeons,” is hung in the banquet hall in the north building of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Another, “Bamboo and Magpies,” can be seen on the wall of the conference hall of the Shanghai municipal government. A relatively small, 33cm-square painting of hers sells for about 18,000 yuan (US$2,956).
At the recent Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair, Wan attended the launch of Zhao Lihong’s first novel for kids, “My Childhood River.”
“It is the first time that I have illustrated a children’s book,” Wan said. “Zhao’s work reminds me of the childhood I spent in the countryside. It’s something that is all natural to me.”
Wan still teaches at the college, where she has a workshop.
“I can’t say there’s no struggle. I just do the best I can,” she said. “I am more interested in the subjects that we commonly see in our daily lives. The magic lies in the details.”
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