"Angels on the Night Watch" by Chen Song'en.
The street sketches created by the artists of "Sketch Guangzhou" have left a unique cultural memory for Guangzhou.
"Sketch Guangzhou" artists create sketches for Peizheng Road.
Doctor Feng Yuan used a paintbrush to record the touching scene of the female nurse who supported Hong Kong's fight against the epidemic before leaving to bid farewell to her children.
Sketches created by the painters for the medical staff who help the elderly scan codes to measure nucleic acid.
A sketch by Fei Zai Bin for Yongqingfang.
At 2:30 a.m. on April 11, Xie Lizhen received a watercolor sketch "Angel on the Vigil" sent by her friend Chen Song'en from WeChat, which recorded a moving scene of her and medical staff sticking to the nucleic acid test post on the street in the early morning. This work was created by Chen Song'en based on her work photos posted in the circle of friends. The moment she saw the painting, she immediately "broke the defense", "suddenly a shock in her heart, almost crying out."
Xie Lizhen is a party member social worker at the Nanshi Street Social Work Station in Haizhu District, Guangzhou. In recent days, Guangzhou 11 District has launched nucleic acid testing for all employees, and she and her colleagues have devoted themselves to the work of street nucleic acid testing organizations and fought for 3 days and nights. After being moved, she immediately sent this painting of "calling" for the grass-roots community epidemic prevention workers to the street work group to pass on this encouragement.
Xie Lizhen and Chen Song'en are both members of Sketch Guangzhou. It is a spontaneous community of interests formed by street sketch enthusiasts in the Pearl River Delta region, with members from all walks of life, ranging from white-haired elderly people to childlike primary school students. Every weekend, they carry drawing boards and gather on a street corner in Guangzhou for half a day's sketching.
If roaming is the best way to understand a city, then city sketching is another way to freeze the flow of time and freeze the fireworks of the world. During the epidemic period, the painters of "Sketch Guangzhou" recorded the scenes of heart-warming battle epidemics around them, while transmitting warmth and condensing people's hearts, they also left the most vivid and authentic personality portrayal for the flower city of Guangzhou.
● Southern Daily reporter Li Pei and Huang Chuxuan
Images in this edition are provided by respondents
"Brushes have a silent power"
As a member of "Sketch Guangzhou", Xie Lizhen is not only the recorded person, but also the recorder.
Xie Lizhen studied at Guangzhou Fine Arts Middle School in her early years, never touched a paintbrush after graduation, and it was not until she became acquainted with "Sketch Guangzhou" in 2020 that she began to draw sketches again.
Not long ago, she painted the scene of young volunteer Mr. Wang participating in the frontline epidemic prevention in the Shiweitang community in Liwan District. "On the 'i Volunteer' app, I learned that he had served more than 40 times as a five-star volunteer, and I felt very encouraged and moved." Xie Lizhen said.
In the past two years, she has adhered to the frontline of community epidemic prevention, and in her spare time, she has fixed many touching moments with a paintbrush: the sinking party members who are busy until the early morning under the party banner, the volunteer sister who helps Grandma find the two-dimensional code data... The protagonist of the picture, Xie Lizhen, mostly does not know, only one side of the fate.
In February this year, Xie Lizhen created a five-panel comic "A Night with Temperature", which recorded the trivial and busy day of street social workers, from vaccination checking and registration, to helping the elderly in difficulty settle down, until 11 o'clock in the evening, the working group continued to receive information... After the painting was sent out in the circle of friends, relatives and friends in the neighborhood praised her.
"Brushes have a silent power that makes the person feel 'understood, understood, recorded.'" Xie Lizhen said that the painters used sketching forms to gather and pass on the unknown bits and pieces of Guangzhou's grassroots anti-epidemic.
In addition to creators like Xie Lizhen, who have a certain foundation, "Sketch Guangzhou" also has many members who start from scratch. Feng Yuan, a "post-85" doctor in the Rheumatology Department of Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital, is one of them.
Feng Yuan, who was originally just painting "Xiao Bai", began to teach herself to paint through the Internet 8 years ago, with the original intention of "self-healing". Feng Yuan told reporters: "Rheumatism is a chronic disease, I have known many patients for more than ten years, sometimes when I hear the news of their deterioration, the mood will be very low, painting can let me relax and restore calm." ”
One day in 2018, she signed up for the "Sketch Guangzhou" event. Perhaps out of the doctor's professional habits, Feng Yuan will carefully observe the details of the life of the old Guangzhou neighborhood, and the dried fruits, orange peels, and even a mop on the windowsill will inspire her. Once, when sketching in the old city, the neighbors also brought her benches and drinks, and she was deeply impressed by the tolerance and humanity of Guangzhou.
Because of the epidemic, Feng Yuan has rarely participated in sketching activities in the past two years, but she has drawn more diligently.
In February this year, when hospital colleagues gathered to support the epidemic in Hong Kong, Feng Yuan saw a female nurse saying goodbye to a pair of children before leaving. As soon as she returned home, she created a watercolor sketch to express her blessings and respects to her peers. In the past two years, she has sketched many busy figures of "Great White" silently dedicating and protecting life, "Every time the epidemic hits, they are the protagonists of this city."
The "Unknown Painter" looking for "pyrotechnics"
More than 40 years ago, lawyer Wang Yi came to Guangzhou from Shanxi to develop. When it comes to the reason for the connection with sketching, he uses a very literary expression - in order to "find the fireworks of the world".
In a sketching activity on Gaodi Street, Wang Yi chose "Xu Di" as the object of creation, where Lu Xun's wife, Xu Guangping, spent her childhood. In his paintings, winding cables, climbing tigers covering the walls, plastic canopy on old windows... Xu Di, which once bred the "first family of Guangzhou" in modern times, is full of dappled marks of the baptism of time.
Wang Yi has served as the "Guangzhou Scholars Yangcheng National Promotion Ambassador" for two terms. In addition to painting, he was busy reading, writing, and doing public welfare, expanding "one person's hobby" to "the hobby of a group of people." Today, one of his goals in life is to add a bit of humanistic atmosphere to Guangzhou as much as he can.
"Sketching is a very private thing, but when a group of people paint a portrait of the city together, sketching actually becomes a cultural phenomenon, attracting more people to pay attention to, feel and know the city of Guangzhou, which is a very meaningful thing." Wang Yi said.
"Most of us are new Guangzhou people, and everyone is using paintbrushes to discover the different beauty of the city." According to Xiao Longchuan, one of the initiators of "Sketch Guangzhou", in 6 years, the team has slowly developed from the initial 3 people to the scale of thousands of people, and several WeChat groups of 500 people have been built.
In the past six years, the painters have traveled to many corners of Guangzhou's old town, such as Liwan, Yuexiu and Haizhu. They aim at the life of the city, and there are arcades full of sheets, ordinary people in the bamboo door, bamboo tube houses, the shouts of vendors, the aroma of snack bars... The strong atmosphere of city life was integrated into the painting by the painters with colors and lines.
Xiao Longchuan stressed that sketching has a different deep meaning from taking pictures and punching cards. "Taking pictures is only a few seconds, and sketching takes at least half an hour, which is a deep touch on the city's culture." He said that every sketch has a sound and taste, and although the painting is flat, the emotion it contains is multi-dimensional and three-dimensional.
In 2019, the "China Guangzhou Release" Weibo selected 9 works of "Sketch Guangzhou" under the title of "Guangzhou Temperature", and these works were later exhibited in the long corridor of Liurong Street Cultural Square and were loved by neighbors.
In October 2020, the fourth anniversary exhibition of "Sketch Guangzhou" was held in Shamian, and a Mr. Chen who came to see the exhibition said: "I didn't expect to see the place where I lived when I was a child, and their paintings evoked my childhood memories." ”
"We use sketches to leave a special memory for Guangzhou." Xiao Longchuan said that more than 200 periods of out-of-town sketching activities, tens of thousands of sketches, all come from obscure "anonymous painters", "each one is not reproducible."
Public creations that spread the beauty of the city
From pens and watercolors to Chinese paintings and two-dimensional elements, the sketching styles of "Sketch Guangzhou" artists are very different, and they also create "surreal" urban streetscapes, injecting creativity and imagination into old streets and alleys.
Fat Zaibin is called a "big god-level" figure by his friends, and some people say that he is like a magician, painting a Guangzhou that "grows out of the ground". Growing up in Xiguan, Guangzhou, he loves street graffiti art, he combines graffiti art with sketching to create a 3D sketch style, adding vigorous colors and jumping lines to the old Xiguan houses and small restaurants, so that the old streets are "reborn" with fashionable and dynamic faces.
"What we lack is not an expression of beauty, but an expression of individuality." Fei Zaibin hopes to activate the expression of Guangzhou's urban characteristics with new elements, and his Yangcheng Old Street, Food Stalls, and Cantonese-style Tea Houses have become popular on social media such as Xiaohongshu and Weibo.
Today, his works are hung on the green brick wall of The First Phase of Yongqingfang, attracting many young people to punch in.
In addition to injecting new vitality into the ancient neighborhood, "Sketch Guangzhou" is also increasingly participating in urban public culture construction and public welfare care activities, adding luster to Guangzhou, which gets along day and night.
In 2021, Guangzhou Bus Group and "Sketch Guangzhou" jointly moved the "Taste of Xiguan" series of sketches to the Guangzhou bus line, evoking many people's nostalgia for the "old Guangzhou taste". Not long ago, the two sides once again joined hands to launch a second bus route with the theme of museums, involving cultural landmarks such as the Agricultural Lecture Institute, the Guangzhou Art Museum, and the Chen Clan Ancestral Hall, and the painters were ready to use the "sketch style" to "light up" the city's cultural memory again.
"Sketch Guangzhou" also walked into the elderly apartment in the old town of Guangzhou to paint a portrait of the elderly. "Although the painters are not very good at drawing portraits, they are very careful to draw Q-version heads for their grandparents." Xiao Longchuan remembers that an old grandmother was very touched after getting the painting, saying that "no one has ever painted a portrait of her." There is also an old couple over ninety years old, who are slurred with speech due to Alzheimer's disease, but after seeing the "couple heads" created by the painters for the two, they smiled and closed their mouths.
In 2021, under the guidance of sculptor and painter Liu Yi, the painters came to Guangzhou Zhongluotan Huiling Farm, which provides services for the mentally handicapped, to create wall paintings. Many people are painting on the wall for the first time with acrylic, more than 30 artists have worked together to complete three color jumping, imaginative wall paintings, and whales riding in a warm cabin swim in the underwater world, like a continuous colorful dream, which suddenly makes people feel the gentleness of the sea breeze... The nostalgia for Guangzhou and the yearning for a better life that they poured into the paintings were so intense and fiery.
Previously, the "Man Art and Sketch Group Exhibition" was exhibited at the Yuexiu District Cultural Center near the East Lake in Guangzhou, and the works of the "Sketch Guangzhou" painters appeared on the same stage as the works of professional painters and professors of the Academy of Fine Arts. The creation of these lonely amateur painters makes Zhu Songqing, a professor at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, remember vividly: "Their urban sketches are not cold records, but expressions of temperature." The heartfelt works of different painting styles carry the emotions and attitudes of a thousand words about Guangzhou. ”
Expert reviews
Zhu Songqing (professor at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, deputy director of the Comic Arts Committee of the China Artists Association, director of the Comic Arts Committee of the Guangdong Provincial Artists Association) youth sketches help shape urban civilization
Sketching is a craft with a bit of youthful imprint, a short-term and low-cost art practice, and an unfettered exploration and practice. This allows you to freely explore the language of painting, skills and techniques. When you enter this realm, you will find that it is endlessly fun, just as wonderful as playing a game. The fast food-style image reading with mobile phones as the main carrier will make everyone have digital visual aesthetic fatigue. Sketches based on paper and pure handiwork have formed a compensatory and healing cultural resource, so many urban sketches have "become popular" on social media, spreading and showing the cultural characteristics of the city.
Many years ago, I said that looking back at the Renaissance, we can see that art is to human civilization as art is to art, as sketching is to art, and sketching is to sketching.
As far as my personal experience of sketching is concerned, young people draw more sketches, especially more exploratory sketches, which can comprehensively enhance their personal artistic literacy. And if guangzhou can have many young people who love sketching and become a fashion and a normal life, then Guangzhou will definitely not only be an art city, but also a truly civilized city.
Sun Ge (librarian of the Guangdong Provincial Government Research Museum of Culture and History and a national first-class artist) has left a warm cultural record for the city
Sketching is an art form that directly faces life, and the painter uses his own observations, feelings and artistic language to express life. The same scene, every sketcher will never paint the same, it shows the painter's unique emotions and skills for things. It can be said that sketching can well express the observations and records of contemporary people "present" and show their love for life.
There are so many people participating in "Sketch Guangzhou", using the art form of "Sketch" to express their love for guangzhou life, history, architecture and other cultural features, leaving an emotional and warm record for the city, and making this record a part of their daily life, which is a very good thing. These works gather in the sand into towers and converge into a deep emotional expression of the city.