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Painting the Seeds of Art
As one of the participants in Stella's project, I was invited to
paint on a blank canvas onto which an image of a Tuen Mun street
was being projected. We were all given an hour to paint, and the
task entailed stepping into the virtual space captured by the
projected image. As I am not a practised painter, I painted
naively. I wondered how much of my own artistic practice in
digital art would benefit this exercise. In order to have an easy
start, I read the image as if it was pixelized, starting with
light colors and was gradually adding various colors to different
regions of the projected image, mapping the colors delivered from
the projector with the paints generously made available to me.?
After a while, I realized that the light coming from the projector
shifted my perception of the colors that I put on canvas. I could
only manage to match the colors on the palette with the projected
image on the uncolored canvas.? Once the colors were on the
canvas, I could not distinguish whether what I was seeing was the
actual paint colour, or the colour produced by the projector. The
color reference produced by the projected image shifted and became
ambiguous. So, every time I put a color on I eliminated some
existing references. Sometimes, I could not even manage to
distinguish whether I had put colors on a particular area or not.
At other times, the shiny reflections of the wet paint under the
projected light guided me. It was impossible for me to control the
final outcome. In painting, we talk about composition and the
distribution of colors. But in this case, there was no way that I
could step back and adjust the overall effects of the painting. At
that moment, I felt a bit frustrated as I secretly wished to make
a nice painting and wanted the final work to be in my control and
accomplished according to my artistic plan. However, this desire
was discouraged by the painting situation in which I found myself.
Instead, the double vision produced by seeing both the projected
image and the newly added paint drew me into a liminal space
between the two. Every brushstroke determined the final work. This
work was not about “painting-as-object”, but about the action of
painting itself. Every brush is a step. Step by step, we developed
our own vivid path at Tuen Mun through creating these images. This
experience was so enjoyable that it encouraged me to indulge more
in painting, enriching my studio practice.
As an experienced painter, Stella chose not to be the sole painter
of the canvases in this project. Instead she created some space
for painting. She shaped the painting environment, invited people
from different backgrounds to paint, made herself accessible to
all the visitors during those one-hour sessions, and initiated a
lot of discussions about painting techniques and the Tuen Mun
environment. The exhibition will be staged in the same location
that these painting activities took place. This is an installation
which was not only designed for exhibition. More importantly, it
was constructed to initiate a series of meaningful exchanges
through painting activities. In this environment, the blank canvas
was the soil, the bottles of paint were water, and the seeds of
art were spread.
Zoie SO
Teaching Fellow
Department of Visual Studies
Lingnan University, Hong Kong
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