Nobility and the art of being young

A bowl of noodles or a piece of cloth draped over a bicycle shed are the simple kinds of things that can get the creative juices flowing

"Held high up against the sun, the violet bead of grape melts into a purple sea". Guan Yanfei wrote the lines when she was 12, for the thick album of paintings published in memory of art, in the way she saw it, as her first love.

Two years have passed since then. Today Yanfei is still fond of using sunlight as a metaphor, in an effort to describe the thrill and enchantment of a creative process, feelings that are almost beyond words.

"I felt like water, blended with the oil that was my paint," she says. "Together we rolled down the canvass in large drops, reflective of the sunlight that fills the room."

Indeed, oil is her favorite medium, as the collection of her light-soaked works demonstrate. The colors are heaped onto the canvass, probably by a paint knife, to create a matte surface full of tension, texture and a creative maelstrom. In short, they are mood paintings.

And it is this mood-recording process of art making that Wang Wei, founder of Color Edu, is determined to show to his young students. "Strokes and sentiments - they are inseparable," says the 34-year-old, who founded his own children's art education center after spending a decade in the industry.

"I chose gouache for my youngest students - four or five-year-olds - instead of the more commonly used watercolor or Chinese ink because gouache is less free-flowing and so is easier to control for a child. Its quality also means that it is more capable of documenting the entire creative process than many other media. Every stroke and every dab is visible from the final work, even those first painted and later regretted. I want the connection between a child and what he or she paints to be more visceral and palpable. In this way the child learns to express him or herself through art." (The oil classes are available for children aged 8 and above.)

Expressing oneself

Wang Lijuan, an art student-turned-children's art educator, says that as a child she found it hard to express herself through just one channel.

"Painting of course was something I'm really interested in," says Wang Lijuan, whose engineer father also passed on to her the fervor for handiwork.

"But at the same time I was also fond of singing and taking part in school plays. My father helped me make things using wooden planks and an electric drill."

Two decades later Wang introduced wooden planks and electric drills to her class, for her teenage students who together built a bridge at the center's summer camp in Beijing.

At her place, students adopt a multidisciplinary approach to studying art, an approach that, Wang Lijuan says, "engages all of a child's senses and speaks for who he or she is".

"The art we make must reflect who we are. In other words it's the whole you, as opposed to part of you, that must go into whatever you make."

In one class, students, after being blindfolded, are asked to feel various objects - a grotesquely shaped resin box, for example - with their hands. They are later required to retrieve the shape from memory, by using mud.

"Their senses are sharpened and in turn could serve the purpose of art-making more effectively," Wang Lijuan says.

A glimpse into one of her classrooms opens up a wonder world: some spiraling paper sculptures dangle from the ceiling while wooden sticks, iron nails, cloth and tubes of paint are scattered across a long table. Standing by the doorstep is a robot-like contraption created using a wide variety of materials including wood, metal and foamed plastic.

"We never say no to painting. Instead, we incorporate it into 'the bigger picture', one that's big enough for the children's free-running thoughts," Wang Lijuan says. "In other words, we are bent on conveying our thoughts, using anything that seems appropriate. The result could be a painting; it could also be a piece of sculpture or installation art, an audiovisual show, or even a theatrical work."

Wang Lijuan says she once harbored doubts about her own method, but had those qualms dispelled when she completed her postgraduate study in art education at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

"That was in 2004, and we had teachers from all over the world - the United States, Britain, Germany and Japan. I remember a professor from Columbia University talking about using music as inspiration: he had asked students to draw out what they heard, in lines. This is in fact exactly what I did for my students, even before I came to Beijing."

Sensory connections

Wang Wei and his fellow teachers also explore sensory connections at Color.

"A student of mine, an 11-year-old girl, is very enthusiastic about food," says Zhang Shuang, Wang Wei's partner in life and work. "She once talked to me about her lack of progress, and I encouraged her to paint the thing that she loved the most - food."

The result surprised everyone, including the girl herself. A big bowl of beef noodles complete with tomato soup, some celery leaves and a pinch of leek. "She conjured up the color and texture of the few hard-boiled beef cubes with just a few strokes," Zhang says. "Irresistible is how I would describe most of her appetizing food paintings."

The 34-year-old is also the person behind Color's Study Tour Project. The project arranges for students to travel to renowned historic and cultural cities in China and elsewhere, to soak in the patinaed past and the pulsating present.

"We traveled to the city of Jingdezhen, China's most famous kiln, and to Florence, Italy, where the sunshine was bright enough to penetrate the darkness of the Middle Ages and herald in the Renaissance," Zhang says. "Vision is everything."

The sunlight has also lit up Yanfei's canvass, as her paintings are drenched in the saturating colors of yellow, blue and green. Wang Wei says color open helps children frame up their best works.

"It's of utmost importance for the students to look at their own works and draw from there the same delight as they would from the masterpieces," he said. "We want the children to regard themselves as creators of beauty. And beauty is something that takes hold of us before anything else - logics for example - does."

Wang Jinhua, whose daughter Wei Jing spent five years at Lijuan Art, says she clearly remembers the very first class the girl had. "The teacher draped a piece of cloth over the bike shed just outside the building. The students were then handed sprinklers with which they could spray the cloth. What came out of the sprinklers was, of course, paint."

Asked whether her young students could grasp the meaning behind everything they did (in one case they are asked to lie down on a public square), Wang Li Juan said that to get into action - or non-action as in this case - is one way to help them understand things.

Free-spirited

Last summer Zhong Baoxian, a longtime student from Lijuan Art, was enrolled by Pratt MWP College of Art and Design in the United States. "My daughter is too free-spirited to be categorized," says Li Xiurong, Zhong's mother. "She found her own place at Lijuan Art."

Wang Wei, who graduated from the oil painting department of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, says he was once taught an important lesson by a fellow student at the college.

"She rarely attended classes yet was always able to come up with something truly different," he says. "Later she won top prize in a painting competition in which we all took part. A professor I admired told me that she won because 'her painting is noble'."

"I didn't understand what he meant until many years after I went into children's art education. Being noble is a quality that stems from freedom of the heart and is nurtured by, among other things, the sheer joy of encountering beauty.