Practice on Watercolour

First time trying watercolour. I find it very satisfying with the ease to control over the texture.

Sunset watercolour

Painting with Poetry: Distant Sail

Home in a distance.

Flee in a moment.

Set sail into the endless ocean,

As the engulfed cities perish in blaze.

What sets us ablaze?

What divides us afar?

A drip of ink?

Or a smear of white paint?

Perhaps it is the same waned cinder of ashes,

Whom we shackle at the bottom of the ships.

And so all the lives dissolved,

Into the image of a distant past,

Through the inheritance of generations.

©Paulus of Sinae July 2016

Painting While Travelling: Perth in Oz

A re-imagination of the view of Perth from King’s Park overlooking the Swan River.

Let’s embrace that sun.

Don Juan, the dog

Growing up in between

II Don Juan, the dog

The landlord used to keep a mutt. Perhaps “keeping” was not the right word. The mutt just appeared in front of the lobby of the building every morning. The landlord would give him a bowl of leftover for breakfast, and then the mutt would disappear until the next day morning.

One day, Alexei’s mother suggested to follow the mutt and see what he was doing after breakfast.

That morning they became the stalking detectives.

The mutt first stopped by a tiny park (probably of just 8 sq meters) in the urban centre of Hong Kong. Within the bushes, came several tiny puppies and another big female mutt.

“So he was meeting his family,” the mother said to Alexei.

The two detectives continued their stalking.

Upon every traffic light, the mutt would sit down and wait for the green light to cross. He also stopped by a number of different spots, at which at least one female dog was waiting.

Occasionally, he would stop by restaurants.

One of the restaurants was an Italian restaurant, just like which in Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp”, though he didn’t bring one of his girlfriends for the fancy meal.

At the end of the day, the two detectives concluded that the mutt was the Don Juan of his kind.

However, a few months later, the mutt no longer came.

Was he dead? Had he found a new home? Or perhaps he was sick of the cheap leftovers?

Alexei could not tell.

Maybe the mutt, like every Hong Kong people, was also lost in the urban jungle.

 

 

Micro fiction with practice painting on J. S. Sargent

She raised her hand, and the world stopped for her.

The cashmere cape danced in the air.

Every thread was the melody that drove the steps.

The steps were sometimes of a lion; sometimes of a panther.

Either way the heat was eager to claw my heart out.

Her arms and fingers twisted and waved.

I retreated backward and she approached onward.

Within the rhythm, my back was forced to the wall.

She slapped me.

“We are done!”

The next day I received a phone call from the divorce attorney.

The painting was my study on the dancer in Sargent’s El paleo.

It took me 2 days to finish the study, and the dress really drove me crazy.

©Paulus of Sinae (Chan Po Lo Paul) April 2016

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Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

Wash the dishes!

Growing up in between

I. Wash the dishes!

Alexei Lau was born as a Hong-Kong-nese or Hongkie as the Singaporeans put it, but his parents were poor immigrants to Hong Kong from China.

As poor as they were, the whole family rented a 4-square-meter room in a big apartment in the old urban part of Hong kong. There were so many tenants in this apartment, each renting a room.

Alexei could recall there were once a group of Indian ladies who always loved to use a lot of lamb oil when cooking. And they were notorious for not washing the pots and dishes, leaving them in the sink for days until the coat of lamb oil formed a yellow crust onto the surfaces.

Alexei, a 2 year old boy back then, hated the smell of lamb. It made him nauseous. Unfortunately there was a hole at the adjacent wall of the bathroom to the kitchen, so the stench was always creeping into the bathroom, and vice versa. 

One day, while Alexei was being bathed by his mother, the stench was sagging into the air again. Suddenly Alexei jumped out of the the plastic bucket (used as a bathtub) and rushed to the room of the Indian ladies, with his mother yelling from behind. 

Alexei banged at the door. It was one of the Indian ladies who answered it. Behind her were six people, all staring at this naked 2-year-old with bubbles in his hair.

Alexei started mumbling and shouting at the poor lost people who had no idea what this little kid was doing. Alexei could no longer figure out what exactly he was talking about right now. The memory was too shattered and old. Yet the main gist he believed was just asking them to “wash the dishes”.

For a moment, the indian lady who opened the door was shocked, but then she started laughing, so were her guests. Hearing the laughters, time stopped for a moment for Alexei. Then the soapy water dripped into his eyes. While he was trying hard to blink away the soap, he was snatched by his mother under from the armpits, and carried back to the bathroom.

Years after, Alexei could finally laugh at that stupid outburst. Also Indian cuisines began to glow on him.

©Paulus of Sinae (Chan Po Lo Paul) April 2016

P.S. Not to my expectation, I found it is more difficult to paint the naan than the curry. If you find that strangely shaped bread confusing, just imagine it as a dough. 🙂

Primeval

Inspired by the Great Norwegian Painter Peder Balke with the touch of the techniques from the great English Painter J.M.W. Turner.

A City in a Mask

Colours in disarray.

And I see the city bleeding black.

This false sight of colourful life

Within the mask of fog sagging down in the city hive.

Gold and neon lights,

Just a hollow maze of night.

We end our past dreams.

We fool our minds.

The trick to us into believing,

Unto a life we trust to be the ideal yet deceiving.

And we toil and forget.

Dissolved us on to the grand canvas with our own sweat.

No longer we own our discrete spectrum.

All spectra of colours bleed into the corrupted red;

Unto the smear of blood on those pair of lost lips.

©Paulus of Sinae April 2016

Practice on Turners

Bored, so a practice on Apple