FRED LIU

I chose to work in various mediums based on Chinese culture and symbolism such as the dragon and phoenix through drawing, choosing meaningful ideographs for the names of my classmates and carving polymer clay to make their name stamps. 

When I started to work on an art project at Ashbury College, I was really confused about color application and some details such as how to draw the shadow of an object. After Ms.Cragg and my friends helped me, I really made a lot of progress in my art skills.

I learned about Zhang Daqian, Qi Baishi and Claude Monet to inspire my work. Zhang Da Qian is a master of tradition, he excels at Chinese traditional paintings, especially landscape and portraiture. When I was painting the background of my dragon and phoenix work, I chose the style of cloud in Zhang Daqian’s paintings. Qi Baishi “is a famous Chinese painter, noted for the whimsical, often playful style of his watercolor works” (Wikipedia entry 2020). He did some ink paintings about dragons, too. I want to use the shape and some details on this dragon. “Monet is a founder of French Impressionist painting and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air landscape painting” (Wikipedia entry 2020). My favourite Monet painting is Lilies. I really like the texture and some of his color processing. 

The biggest challenge in my dragon and phoenix painting is to draw on a wooden board. To draw on a wooden board is really different than drawing on a piece of paper. I cannot use a lot of water, or the color will not adhere to the board. One of my greatest successes is to find a new way to draw a dragon's beard. I used a tiny brush to cover the beard couple times, and this will make the beard more have a sort of real texture.

I hope the viewers will know more about Chinese culture and they might learn about some of the Divine beasts in ancient Chinese culture. Also let everyone who is not familiar to China history acquire some small knowledge about the history and story in my paintings and stamps. 

China has a long history, I really hope to share these interesting stories with others who do not know about China.  For my dragon and phoenix painting, I just want to promote Chinese traditional culture and let more people know about it. My hope is that more people will come to understand traditional, authentic Chinese culture.