Perhaps living in this small town too long and repeating the same routine every day may dull our sensitivity to the fact that we live in a picturesque town surrounded by numerous quaint scenes, which seem to be silently disappearing one by one with the passage of time and replaced by what we call “development”. But thanks to Chio Sio Chi, a well-respected, local master of oil painting who has devoted three decades to capturing and framing the soul of our town, we are given a chance to glance at the ever-changing urban landscape through his eyes and delicate brush strokes.
Settling down in Macau in 1980, at a time when economic reforms in China were just starting, Chio embarked on his artistic journey here, touring around the town with his heavy paint box for spot drawing. Today at 78 years of age, he is still passionate about his pursuit of art. Inspired by the tranquillity and poetical charm of the territory, Chio is eager to portray the footprint of Macau of yesterday, consisting of modern architecture, fishing villages, and old streets where lush banyan trees once grew densely.
A sense of nostalgia is somehow evoked when flipping through his painting album, “Macau Landscape”, which features 283 of his artworks and revives the beauty of old Macau in its original state. The landscapes under his brush are so familiar, so real, so intimate that we can almost imagine they are places we have been to. The historical scenes, within which the beauty transpires from all angles, are eternally frozen and framed in this album.
Chio studied Chinese painting with his grandfather since he was a child, and thus laid a solid foundation in his early years. He was also one of the favourite apprentices of Ren Wei Yin, a renowned Shanghai oil painting master who first introduced thin-paint into this art form. Under Ren he observed the significant differences between the expression of western oil painting and Chinese ink painting, and tried to further elaborate the freedom and flexibility of Chinese painting with the style of brush and ink into the creation of oil painting, replacing the thick and slow moving paint with vivid rhythms and an abundant sense of space belonging only to Chinese painting, to create a new type of oil painting with Chinese style.
According to Chio, the method of oil painting in Europe is to apply the thin primary colour with a lot of volatile oil for draft painting, and cover it with thick paint after the rough painting is completed, with the volatile oil causing the painting to dry very fast. This method allows a painter to control everything in their mind and work with a slow process. After the first phase of the whole work, the thin paint will disappear under the cover of thick paint. However, Chio believes that the first phase of the painting always records the fresh, raw feelings of the painter, which has a very high artistic value, and is called the “spirit” in Chinese painting. Western painters, however, do not attach much importance to it.
“Traditional Chinese painting has a feature of one-time success and it is not good to be revising time and again, which is a quality that no other painting tradition has, and this is the ‘spirit’. The accidental variation from the line, brush stroke and water development always produces unique effects.”
Comparing oil painting with the expressive style of brush and rice paper, he found that rice paper painting is light and unconstrained, with a colourful and imagined sense from diverse ink colours. The first point of Chinese painting is having a “waving brush”. This is a movement like that of handwriting, which requires the sense of “waving” the brush for one-time success without repeated thought and which is contrary to traditional oil painting.
Choi has experienced that thick paint makes the brush stick, is slow to respond and makes the ‘wave’ impossible. Traditional oil painting needs to express more intermediate colour and layers, which requires one to paint patiently, using much energy and time, and makes the form very complete and with a strong cubic effect.
“Although the picture is perfect, it has no ‘spirit’ as we know it in Chinese painting, and the Western style of oil painting always emphasizes both skill and technique but lacks vivid life somewhat like the taste of canned food without the aroma of fresh fruits.”
Hence the thin-paint approach can be used to express many levels, layers and sketch relations, due to its light flow paint that compensates for the mixing of colour over and over again without becoming dark or muddy, Chio points out. The liquidity of the paint after being diluted with oil is greatly improved, not only enriching the colour layer of the picture, but also producing the stroke effect of “free wave” of Chinese painting and the influence of a space relation between reality and fantasy.
In his eyes, one’s personal painting style won’t be shaped unless one practises a thousand times. When Chio was young, he followed Teacher Ren moving all around in China to practise his painting skills outdoors, and he has become used to spot painting regardless of the circumstances. Chio recalls the days that Teacher Ren just stood next to him and showed him directly the way the painting should be and that helped him a lot.
“The impression that painters gain in the field is much more alive than the photos taken to just get an idea of how the landscape looks like. An acute and artistic instinct of a painter can be developed only if one is willing to be with actual scenery and sense the ‘spirit’ within. Things don’t work if a painter just sits in studio. Spot painting enables us to be more attentive to the details and layers of sceneries.”
After undergoing heart surgery two years ago, Chio has been advised not to do any more spot painting; it is too much for his age. He cherishes the time he once sat on the shore of the harbour, framing the scenery of fishing boats under the sunset, the enjoyment he found painting under the old banyan trees around Sai Van Lake, and the friendly interactions he encountered with locals in Coloane, who allowed him to leave his heavy pallet box at his ancestral property right next to Lord Stow’s bakery. Care to sense the nostalgic landscape of the Macau of yesterday? Chio’s thin-paint artworks certainly offer a unique glimpse.
