"Female Van Gogh on the Hospital Bed" Finger Clip Pen Painting for 30 Years The biggest dream is to hold a painting exhibition

"The Female Van Gogh on the Hospital Bed" has been painting with a finger-slit pen for 30 years

I want to paint places I can't reach, and my biggest dream is to hold a painting exhibition

Recently, a video of Station B has attracted attention. The protagonist's name is Zhang Junli, she is 6 years old, sick, 8 years old paralyzed and unable to leave bed. For more than 30 years, Zhang Junli stuck her pen with her fingers and painted the stars and sunsets, the scenery of the fields, the beach and the coast... She used one oil painting after another to let her thoughts fly in places where she could not reach herself, and was called "the female Van Gogh on the hospital bed" by netizens. On February 7, in an interview with Purple Cow News, Zhang Junli said that her biggest dream is to hold a painting exhibition, "If the dream comes true, I will put a painting of a girl running in the field in the middle, that is my imaginary self." ”

Disabled woman who has been bedridden for 30 years

Known as "Female Van Gogh" by netizens

Golden sunlight shines on the blue sea, and the snow covers the high peaks... Recently, a series of oil paintings painted by zhang Junli, a disabled woman, have aroused onlookers. Just looking at the paintings, it's hard to imagine that they came from a disabled person who has been bedridden for more than 30 years. Due to the illness, her fingers have long been unable to bend normally, and her arms are so thin that it is difficult to lift a paintbrush.

After learning the story of the owner of the painting, some netizens sighed: "From a stroke and a painting, I feel the brightness and warmth of life. Some even referred to her as "the female Van Gogh in the hospital bed." On February 7, the reporter contacted Zhang Junli himself. Mentioning the praise of netizens, she hurriedly responded that she was just a painter, "I haven't won any awards, I just like to paint." ”

Zhang Junli is from Taiyuan, Shanxi, born in 1978, to both parents who are school teachers. Her childhood should have been as carefree as many other children, but in the first grade of elementary school, she had swollen wrists and rheumatoid arthritis, and within three years, she was paralyzed in bed at a young age, unable to stand and sit for more than half an hour.

Zhang Junli said: "When I was eight or nine years old, I knew that my life might be different from others, and I began to think about what to do in the future. "On the way to adulthood, Zhang Junli is lonely. The disease has left her growing up far behind her peers. When others go out to play in their free time, she can only read in bed, "I read a lot of fairy tales, read one comic book after another, and slowly fell in love with painting, so I have longed to become a painter since I was a child." 」 ”

Jam the pen with your fingerstrings

Draw the sea of stars that you yearn for

"I like the sky, I like the sea, I like the snowy mountains, these things I think are very beautiful, so I want to paint it." 」 At first, Zhang Junli's hands were quite flexible, but gradually, the pain made her body joints seriously deformed, her fingers twisted and curled together, unable to open independently, let alone draw, and she could not do this action independently. Before each painting, the family would insert the pen into her finger slit, and Zhang Junli tried her best to jam the pen with the finger slit to paint. A simple little painting, she had to paint for many days.

However, she never thought of giving up painting. Over the years, she has painted a variety of flowers and animals, blue skies and white clouds, vast starry skies... Zhang Junli said: "The painting of each period is the expression of my own inner thoughts by recording the world with a pen. In 1996, her comic work was published in a magazine and she received 500 yuan in writing fees, which was the first income she earned on her own. She has a motto that often hangs on her lips: "Nothing stops me from getting better, and if you don't try, you don't know how much potential you have, you don't know how much you can do." ”

This sentence was told to Zhang Junli by a friend, a pen pal of the same age she had only met three times, Yu Yimei, a Sichuan girl. The two met by contributing to a comic magazine together, and their connection has not been interrupted since 1995.

"At first it was a letter exchange, she wrote a letter to my house for a week, I wrote another letter to her for another week, so it took hundreds of letters back and forth, and then there was a BB machine, and then there was the Internet." Speaking of this fate, Yu Yimei always smiled. In fact, she is not only Zhang Junli's listener, for a while, she was more like Zhang Junli's other pair of eyes, "I see anything interesting will be described to her through letters, and she will draw it with a pen." ”

Zhang Junli is very willing to read Yu Yimei's letter, in her opinion, if she is not suffering from illness, she will also be like Yu Yimei, to see the outside world. In the same way, others say that she does not believe, Yu Yimei said that she is willing to believe, and publishing oil paintings on the Internet is also Yu Yimei's advice to her. Since 2012, Zhang Junli has attracted the attention of many people for her oil paintings and has been invited to participate in many CCTV programs.

Yu Yimei said that at first Zhang Junli was still quite hesitant, "On the one hand, she felt that the oil painting materials were expensive, and she was afraid of increasing the burden on her family." On the other hand, she is shy and reluctant to tell her story publicly online. Until later, Zhang Junli was slowly warmed by netizens, and only then did she open her heart," Some netizens saw that oil painting materials were expensive, and they also specially bought a big and far away mail to her. Yu Yimei said.

At one point, he lost weight to 20 kg

Authoring is always ongoing

In September 2021, Zhang Junli's condition worsened again, the joints of the whole body were swollen, the weight was only 20 kilograms at one point, and when she went to the hospital for examination, the results showed that rheumatoid rheumatoid was in the active period, the normal range was 0-18, and her was several hundred, "These numbers are so big that I am afraid to look at them, the doctor prescribed various drugs, and I am slightly better at present." Zhang Junli said that as she grew older, she could feel more and more physical weakness, and she used to paint for five hours a day, but now she can only paint for more than two hours, "but I still like to paint." ”

This year, Zhang Junli came to The B station, she posted her creative process and some works on the Internet, and won the attention and support of many strange netizens. There will also be some fans who put forward professional suggestions for painting, Zhang Junli said bluntly: "These suggestions have helped my creation a lot." In the creation, I actually don't have much obsession with color, more is the expression of the spiritual world, like the mountains and rivers of nature, natural colors are enough in my opinion. Zhang Junli said that painting can make her feel the beauty of the world, so she also hopes that the audience can feel the beauty through her works.

Zhang Junli's creative inspiration comes from various aspects, such as after illness, sometimes dreaming of the sky full of stars, and will be recorded with paintings. "I wrote down not only the starry sky, but also the self who had looked up at the starry sky." In addition, she usually sees the beautiful scenery taken by her friends when they travel on social platforms, and she will also draw them against the picture, "Since I can't go around and see the world, then see the world through the eyes of others." ”

Earn a living by painting

I hope to hold an exhibition of my own paintings

Now Zhang Junli's main means of making a living is to sell paintings, the reporter entered Zhang Junli's shop and found that Zhang Junli's paintings ranged from a few hundred yuan to two or three thousand yuan, "sometimes you can sell a few paintings a month, sometimes you can't sell them for several months in a row." She recalled, "Once a friend from Nanjing came to buy a painting, I offered 1,000 yuan, but the other party insisted on increasing the price to 1314 yuan, saying that it was given to a future girlfriend, which meant good." That time Zhang Junli was very touched, she said: "Others are willing to put my paintings at home, I have been very moved, many times I take the initiative to reduce the price to sell." ”

In addition to painting, Zhang Junli will also sell some postcards that cost twenty or thirty yuan, Zhang Junli said, "Some student friends also want to support me, I told them, you are still in school, save some money, buy a few postcards, I am very grateful." ”

"In recent years, I can clearly feel that the paintings are selling better than before." Zhang Junli lamented that the rise of video platforms has brought about earth-shaking changes, "I also posted the creation process of each of my paintings on the Internet, some people said that my paintings sold expensive, and now they see the painstaking efforts I injected when I created, and they understand." ”

Speaking of the future, Zhang Junli said that her biggest wish is to be able to hold a painting exhibition. "This is an idea that I had a long time ago, but it is difficult to rely on my own strength, and no one around can help me, so I have been dragging on, dragging from hope to luxury." 」 Zhang Junli said that if there is really that day, she would most like to have two paintings in the middle.

"One is the sky of Tibet, I painted it and put it on the professional website, which was evaluated by the teachers of the professional school, and they gave me a high evaluation. At that time, I had just learned to draw, and this evaluation gave me the confidence to persevere. Zhang Junli said that the other picture is a small child running, this child is her imaginary self, can run freely in the boundless world.

(Source: Yangtze Evening News)