chinese oil painting

chinese oil painting
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The focus of today's lesson is tree branches. The students of James Chen's Chinese oil painting class at the Baldwin Park Julia McNeill Senior Center have already learned how to hold their brushes and create the correct strokes with ink on rice paper.
Now they're learning how to reproduce the work of masters from a tradition that spans millennia. Students lean in to Chen as he explains what kind of brushes and strokes they can use to copy a landscape of pines against a background of mountains whose watercolors bleed into a hazy background. One day, Chen said, they will learn how to create their own original compositions - Chen teaches students of all levels here from West Covina, Arcadia and even LAX here in Baldwin Park and also at adult schools in Rosemead-El Monte and Cerritos - but for right now, these students are learning the basics.

One of Chen's students Le Nakashima, of Walnut, is already learning one of the tricky parts of her brush painting. Nakashima took oil painting classes, where it was easier to blur, smudge or repaint a mistake. But in brush painting, she said even if you paint over a flaw, the relief of the flawed stroke still shows. Chinese oil painting is a slow, painstaking art - and that's part of the attraction. Nakashima, for one, said she started taking classes from Chen just to have the pleasure of still. Life painting. She said she likes it because it allows her to carve out time in Advertisement her life to do something quiet - away from her family. When her 16-year-old asks her to do something, she enjoys being able to tell him, "Wait a second, Mom has homework to do." Chao Li also enjoys painting as a sort of retreat. "When you're painting, you forget everything that troubles you," Li said. Li, a retired civil engineer, said he's always been interested in Chinese painting, but it wasn't until retirement that he finally had the chance.

It's a story you'll hear over and over again in Chinese oil painting classes. Chen's classes are full of students who spent their lives in technical, mathematic fields.
"I teach lots of doctors," Chen said. Chen's story isn't too different. He attended the Tatung Institute of Technology in Taiwan and worked in the computer industry his whole life. Now that he's retired, he's been able to devote himself wholeheartedly to a lifelong hobby. But as much as it's about relaxing and spending time alone, his painting students come away with a tangible product.
Chen said that one of the main features that differentiates this tradition from a realistic Western tradition is that Chinese art isn't too concerned with the way something looks in real life, but the meaning it conveys.