Life and Art

I was artistically challenged when I was a young child. I could not draw, paint, or play a musical instrument.

However, the very first art lesson I received was when my uncle firmly placed his right hand over mine and guided me to write my first Chinese calligraphy on rice paper as a rite of scholarly passage at age four.

At school age, I was taught and exposed to the heroic force and flowery elegance of language when my parents encouraged me to read the classic poems and laments of heroes in Chinese history.

I learned that the “tour de force” of Chinese poetry could fan the flames and command the direction of patriotism and revolutions alike.

I guess that was the germinal stages of development in my innate artistic seedling.

In my teen years, I discovered my love for language and its nuances while attending an all-boys ivy league high school. I began to love English poetry and essays.

Though English was my second language (We spoke Cantonese at home), I excelled in writing English, its grammatical application, and the subtleties of the language in poetry and song lyrics.

At 17, I did very well in English Literature and Writing in the University of London Advance Level Syllabus High School exam.

As a hobby, I began to write poetry, and even attempted two original song lyrics to guitar music as a teenager.

My love of the English language continued as I elected to be in an English Honours program in my second year at the University of Manitoba towards my first degree.

Language is an art of expression. Thus, it was not a far fetch for me to fall in love with another form of artistic expression: photography.

I began finding poetic expressions in the world around me through the view finder of a camera lens.

Over the course of three decades, I have taken countless photographic images of my world, documenting the events of my life.

Yes. Plenty of baby pictures of our children.

I attempted my first watercolour painting in 1982 when we were vacationing in a friend’s summer cottage by the Northumberland Strait in New Brunswick.

Using my two-year-old’s watercolour paint set and whatever paper that laid around, I painted two images: my two-year-old’s face and a New Brunswick beer bottle. Debbie’s remark was: “Not bad, Tom.”

I never picked up a paint brush again… for a long, long time… until Christmas of 1990.

It was a wintry morning during the Christmas vacation. Nobody was up yet. I once again borrowed my son’s (forgot whose) watercolour paint set and began painting what I saw through the window of my study… the big spruce outside with a shroud of freshly fallen fluff, sparking occasionally in the rays of the rising sun.

The end-result was, startling myself, not too bad!

I showed Debbie at breakfast time. She encouraged me to get some “real artist stuff” and pursue this new-found delight.

That was 18 years ago, and, proverbially, I never looked back.

I have been painting watercolours for 18 years. I have held about a dozen art shows over the years.

Purportedly, one of my paintings is hung in a church in Tokyo, Japan, and another is in the office of a general in Lisbon, Portugal.

Over the years, I have discovered that my techniques and subject matter have certainly broadened, but my style has become uniquely my own.

I love to share with others this passion of mine. I have been conducting a noon-hour watercolour painting club for students for the past 17 years! I have also been invited to conduct workshops for teachers annually.

Guess what Debbie has given me this past Christmas?

A classy painting easel and an acrylic painting kit.

“It’s time you should expand your horizon with mediums,” Debbie bubbled.

I guess it will be another brave new world for me to enter into.

Who says an old dog cannot learn new tricks?