Taihang Mountain looks good in oil

Oil painting may have been introduced to China from the West, but Chinese oil painter Fan Miao has found his own way to give the medium an Eastern flavor.His exhibition, Landscapes of Mind, at the National Art Museum of China displays 26 of Fan's oil paintings. All his works focus on the landscapes of Taihang Mountain in Hebei province, using painting techniques from neo-Impressionism.

At first glance, Fan's works lie somewhere between oil painting and Chinese traditional painting. The composition of his works reminds people of traditional Chinese landscape paintings, but they are all created with oil on canvas."I want to localize oil paintings in China, so I put the spirit of Chinese landscape painting into my oil painting reproduction," says the 50-year-old artist.

Yang Feiyun, dean of Chinese Academy of Oil Painting, says, "Fan's oil paintings have inherited the spirit of China's traditional culture. The magnificence of the mountains in his pictures echoes the mindset of Chinese painters' love for nature."Many of Fan's works feature snow-covered Taihang Mountain, with trees, villages and the Great Wall. The images are drawn from the artist's memory of his hometown of Baoding, a city at the foot of the mountain.

Scenes typical of Baoding are often featured in Fan's work - red-brick houses with square yards, poplars without leaves and mud roads stretching into the far mountains.In his pursuit to be an artist, Fan has never left school. He is now an art professor at a university in Hebei province. He studied oil painting both for his bachelor's and master's degrees. During his study tour abroad, Fan visited France, Italy and Britain, countries where oil painting originated and continues to be popular.

After seeing the work of the masters of oil painting, Fan decided to incorporate elements of Chinese paintings into his art to distinguish his paintings from those in the West."My husband walks a road different from other artists. He changed his art style years ago. It's a risky road, but he never gives up," says Fan's wife Wang Lijia, a Chinese ink painting artist.

Fan says Chinese traditional landscape paintings try to show harmony between man and nature while oil paintings attach more importance to humans. That's why his pictures always have no people in them, only landscapes, to show the feeling of the painter via his brushes.

“It’s one thing to see what happens and it’s another thing to do it,” Chapman said of Julia Child’s words from her book about life in France, where she fell in love with French food and found her true calling.

“For instance,” Chapman said, “It’s one thing to watch people draw, which is really helpful, but it’s another thing to pick up the pencil and draw what you see.”
The 20-year-old woman, a 2011 Old Lyme High School graduate, is working on a bachelor’s degree of fine arts in painting at Boston University and plans to earn her art education certificate upon graduation, followed by work on her master’s degree. Right now her sights are set on the fall when she applies for a spring semester abroad in Venice.

Helping her along the way will be the $2,000 scholarship she won from the Latin Network for the Visual Arts based in Gales Ferry. The nonprofit arts organization sponsored the award, which the Community Foundation of Eastern Connecticut distributed this summer. It is the third scholarship given by the LNVA to students pursuing the visual arts in college, in keeping with the group’s mission to enrich the southeastern Connecticut community through visual arts created by contemporary Latin artists whose roots lie in Romance language speaking countries.

LNVA Co-Founder Mimi Daumy noted in Chapman’s thank-you letter that the student said “you are making it possible for me to focus on my studies while I am in school” even though she is quite busy “in a cooperative house doing chores and cooking dinner in return for affordable housing.”

She based the cardboard sculpture off the skull of a triceratops from the Harvard Museum of Natural History, first creating sketches, then working with cardboard and hot glue, applying specific strengthening techniques for strong layers.

Chapman also enjoys portrait painting because each one is new and interesting. She worked from a mirror for her self-portrait, while a portrait of her longtime friend Sarah allowed her to focus on facial features and likeness, and she developed her portrait of Renee, one of her housemates, through a series of mini portraits.   

“I love to work with clay, charcoal and oil paints,” Chapman said. “I love the three dimensionality of clay because it informs my paintings. It allows me to bring more depth into my work.For a clay sculpture, she chose an organic food object – a green pepper – which required news skills in looking for organic forms, enlarging it in clay and painting with acrylic.
  
Her first priority aside from academics as an art student consists of the demands and responsibilities of living in and managing affordable housing for undergraduate women. Translation: Chores. Weekly chores, weekend chores, managing chore rotations for bathrooms, chore rotations for the house and cooking several nights a semester for 24 people.   “Being a part of the Harriet E. Richards (HER) Cooperative House at Boston University has been the absolute best thing that has happened to me while at school, among many other amazing opportunities,” Chapman wrote in her scholarship-winning essay to the Community Foundation.

She wrote that she is part of a community on campus that has a rich history dating back to 1928 that creates affordable housing for undergraduate women. The cooperative house provides affordable living for students who need it to complete their education and it operates on a philosophy based on past traditions and a life book by which members abide as a whole.“In return for reduced cost of living,” she wrote, “we complete duties and promote a healthy community within our house.”

Chapman’s “HER Cooperative House” oil on canvas painting, at 5-by-7 feet, is her largest and presented challenges of incorporating many of her cooperative house members doing daily activities, while not having them sit for her at the same time.

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