It was 1996, I was in junior high school then, and I had mastered the ability to paint a complicated portrait accurately with sketch materials. In summer holiday, I geared up and took out an old-time National Pictorial, on the cover is a minority old man carrying a little child. The picture was very attractive to me, so I decided to copy this picture to a half-sized sketch paper with a pencil. At that time I really felt that half-sized sketch paper was so big, there was a kind of unspeakable excitement when I touched the paper. Shaping carefully, finding the proper proportion, conducting shades and darkness, I took about more than one week to finish it. At the night I finished the sketch, I was so excited and I really thought I was the best painter in the world. Although it was just portraying a magazine cover, for a fourteen years old boy, undoubtedly it met my little ambition. With joy and contentment, I could completely trust in my own painting. That night I invited my first painting teacher plus my first audience - my father to watch my painting. With his affirmation and encouragement, I experienced joy and pleasure my drawing brought to me with deep impression, then I greedily decided to continue this satisfaction. I followed suit to search materials and find pictures, then decided to paint a series about old man and child, which were all sketches on half-sized paper. The second work was a woman with one hand holding her grandson and another taking spinning thread, the third one was about a little girl whispering to her grandpa. I was still very enthusiastic while drawing the second one, however it wasn’t as good as the first one. As to the third one, even worse, and I got a little bored.
Although it now appears that it’s just a teenager portraying some sketches like copying photos in some summer holiday. Of course I was not conscious about what I had experienced, but now it seems that this kind of experience hit some significant issues about painting that I later experienced as I became a professional painter.
The reason why I chose the picture of the old man carrying a child on the cover of Nation Pictorial to a great extent was influenced by my father. There were many official art exhibition catalogues on his bookshelf, which were no lack of such kind of realistic and local-color works conveying nostalgia, affection and daily life, also a very important part for my visual experience in my adolescence. On the other hand, my father himself was a practitioner of this type of painting. This was what I usually saw and heard, which caused profound impact on me. In my judgment at that time, the picture of a minority people carrying a child met the criterion of a good work. This judgment constitutes the premise for the satisfaction and pleasure that I had obtained in my first sketch. Because at that time, I was still lack of the ability to examine my own judgment. What’s more, I had just grasped the ability to paint the object precisely as portrait then, which urge me to find a stage to show my talent, and for me the freshness and eager that half a sketch paper and a vivid photo of portrait brought at that time was unprecedented. Thus, the freshness and the urgent intention to practice my technology had brought me high intensity of focus. This kind of focus is the key factor to complete a good painting. Next, I decided to continue the theme of the old man and the child, because the singleness of painting skill and the lack of self-awareness and introspection about the act of painting itself, this continuation is almost equal to repetition, and repetition is bound to kill freshness. The proficiency of skill will eventually turn into some kind of inertia, which invisibly waste focus, so that painting descend to a process, an operation, it is natural to fall into boredom. What’s more, this experience from excitement to boredom in painting process happened to an adolescence whose body was experiencing physical development, its intensity comparing to adult must be doubled fold.
Speaking of boredom, I would like to draw the topic out of the description and discussion of my early experience of painting. The boredom had indeed touched a more substantive thing in the act of painting, as how to deal with and treat this boredom, I personally think it’s very important for a painter. How to turn boredom into vividness; how to break up the original pattern and reorganize or pour into new element, making the painting more spectacular; or how to look at this process from excitement to boredom with what perspective and attitude, these are important. In the end, I think this requires a speculative and introspection, maintaining vigilance and distance to the existing order or pattern, marginalizing the artist from his work. This calls for the most humble and profound part in the human nature to contain, not just about the external thinking about the diversity and possibility in the subject, content and technique, or how to paint, what to paint. Perhaps I was too stupid, it was very late when I got to realize this. During this period, I was admitted to the academy of Fine Arts, studying undergraduate and graduate course, then becoming a painter, having a crush on to some great master, some lecturer, some style, some concept, some technique, some material, some trend, I had also went over the pleasure and boredom I experienced in the summer in my fourteen for countless times, only got a little understanding. Perhaps all these are the blessing and curse that Muse give to the people who are keen to painting. Yes, blessing and curse are the same thing, regretless craziness and foolishness only exchange the process from pleasure to boring for countless times, even for a little absurd or normality, perhaps it is the beginning of enlightenment.
If that summer in my fourteen was my first love with painting, then the later examining and thinking once and again into the process that I obtained excitement and boredom and eventually normality was in fact the get-along with painting. In this process of acquaintance and getting along, every big or small introspections and critical thoughts pointed to relative awareness. However, painting itself is a subtle and complex behavior with both physical and intellectual property, within which, mind and object, action and thinking, the dragging, tearing, tangling, conveying, transforming and reconciling of sense and sensibility shapes valuable wound, scar, tension or pain, and calls for fresh awareness, cycling, and attributed to insipid. Only in this process, we have the opportunity to get a glimpse of a little bit about the nature of painting, from which new dimensions and new possibilities, have a chance to emerge.
Now I have the ability to review my own pattern and plight, sensing all kinds that fate remind me of through life and painting in the way, staying vigilant about possible corruption and degeneration, keep myself in the right direction that make my mind peaceful, and treat my painting and myself fairly. Thus, what is the end or purpose? Exploring the truth? Or just to make myself live more meaningfully? Perhaps in the end is still emptiness and unknown. Whatever it is, the flesh will always die, decay, left no trace. Though it is a fact, I still don’t want to use the word "nothingness " to retrieve all this. For that encounter in my fourteen, that sunshine summer, I would like to paint with love, all the way…
At noon the day before yesterday, I packed up my paintings, carpenter Li helped me put them in the case, his little daughter was drawing something on the ground with light blue chalk, the sunshine was very good in the Mountain City after rain, pigeons were hovering in mid air...
Shi Lei
August 2015 at Shapingba
