Zheng Zhihua's "Sailor" was my first dream of sailing.
In that dream, it was a late night of lightning and thunder, heavy rain, and a group of sailors soaked in wetness, or pulling on the deck with cables, or shouting in unison to throw heavy iron anchors into the boiling sea. The picture is majestic and romantic, and the image of the sailor standing tenaciously in the terrifying waves ignites the blood of a teenager who breaks into the sea. But when I embarked on the journey to the deep blue, I found that the seemingly rugged sailors could also be hidden painters, and their rough hands could also add a rare touch of brightness to the steel world.
But where the painter paints, it is necessary to first become a bamboo in the chest, for the ship's huge body, carrying dense grain lines and colorful colors, all test the layout of the painter and the grasp of the ship structure, destined to need a magnificent masterpiece to match it. And when the sailors stepped on the deck, from the large opening and closing of the deck coloring, to the clever outline of the gangway sign, the color scheduling of the four directions up and down had already been known.
When the painting is ready in mind, a clean drawing board is needed to infuse the painter's inspiration into it. Unlike other painters, sailors often had to polish their own drawings.
Ships sail in the sea, and the hull cannot avoid the growth of dense rust, like ink spots sprinkled on the drawing board, and sailors need to clear it before they can paint.
It was a tempering of the will, because Tiangong was not often beautiful, and compared to other painters depicted in the bright studio, the sailors were always accompanied by the scorching sun, baptized by wind and rain, and experienced in turn in the heat and cold.
It is also a contest of skills, in the face of stubborn rust, the tools used by the sailors are always dazzling, or a hammer with rust and rust, or an air hammer that accurately harvests the rust area, or a water gun that takes care of the washing, these tools are in the hands of the sailors, and the "nail households" who are unbridled on the deck are obedient. After knocking the rust, polish it carefully, and look at it as a pleasing flat and open.
Days of sweat did not flow in vain, and a mottled drawing board was beaten to a new shape. The rusty and breathless sailors, like every dedicated painter, eagerly threw themselves into the creation and began to mix the paint.
Sailors' library always has a variety of paint buckets, a variety of styles and colors are available, sailors generally first use a thick primer to the rust area to make the rust marks become flat, after the primer dried and solidified, you have to apply two layers of primer, and finally it is the turn to color the topcoat.
The brushing of the topcoat also has a doorway, which cannot be applied too thickly, not to mention the cost of materials, and it is possible to make the thickness of the paint uneven, uneven and uneven. For the sake of the beauty of the ship, each sailor is like applying a mask to his lover, carefully grasping the strength of the brush paint, not only to let it completely cover every rust removal area, but also to make it evenly and smooth, just like the skin is suitable for the body. The edges of the topcoat are also carefully outlined, and even the simplest main deck needs to be drawn into squares, which should be of the right size and shape. If the thickness of the paint surface mentioned above is not mastered, the drawn square is very likely to flow out of excess paint water, like tears can not stop, as if in a grievance to complain about the painter's clumsiness.
When the paint blocks on the main deck are all painted, it looks like a Picasso abstraction. Of course, sailors have to paint far more than the main deck, other painters only need to face a flat drawing board, and everything around the sailor, including under the feet and overhead, may need to be painted, which is simply a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree surround drawing board. Therefore, sailors paint with ears and eyes, carefully looking at everything around them, afraid of missing any tiny place and leaving flaws in the painting.
After a long period of hard work, the painting was finally completed, and they were greeted with no magnesium lamps and flowers, only the exhaustion and oil stains after returning from painting.
Like the wandering masters, they may not know what a great painting they have just completed. They asked for much, and their hearts were filled with simple wishes. This wish is either to earn money to pay for the children's schooling, or to save money to go home and build a small three-story building, or to add a few beautiful clothes for the newlywed wife. Growing up under the red flag, they have the simple idea of adding bricks and contributing to the motherland, at the same time, they also know that doing their own work well is the greatest contribution they can make, and it is also the best way for them to grow. They are the painters on the sea who sketch the beautiful colors of the ships, and they are also the painters of the people who paint the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, real, fresh, ordinary and great.
Source: COSCO SHIPPING crew