Painting My River @ Johore Bungalow, Frasers Hill, May 10, 2008

(this article was contributed by Jade)

A had promised us an “entertaining” games session, and the air was filled with anticipation of perhaps, having to flex our muscles a wee bit more in the outdoors. There was that hint that it was an “outdoors” thing…

Well, surprise us he did, with an “outdoor” activity that involved each of us, being given our set of brushes, a wooden artist palette, a mini stand, canvas and also an acrylic paint set to paint! There was also a special “guide” on painting, provided by Artmakr, which guided one step by step on how to paint.

The theme was “Rivers”, inspired by a bible verse Ps 46:4

“OK folks! We are going to do painting, and the theme is rivers. Rivers can mean a lot of things, it could mean, your source of life, what makes you happy, rivers of joy, your roots..it is up to you how you want to define the meaning of rivers,” said A, our official facilitator for the painting session.

A round of gasp and uncertainty in the form of “ aiyah, how to paint? How ah? What to paint ah? I haven’t done this for a long time!” filled the air. Being in unfamiliar territory especially in the area of self expression wasn’t something that our group of everyday consultants, financial experts, accountant, IT Whizz and oil and gas expert was used to. We were all more used to solving “corporate or work related” matters.

It took us all a while to get going. But eventually, the ideas flowed; the lightly marked sketches by pencil gave way to brilliant colours decorating the canvas. Each of us had a river to paint. Each of us had a way of expressing our river – whether it was a decision to make in our life, a crossroad at the river, or perhaps, our source of life or depicting our joy in colours!

This was coupled with perfect weather, cool breeze blowing in the background, making the newspapers we had lined on the round marbled tables rustle, the scenery which was awash in lush green, giving us a sense of being calm and serene – and most of all, the crisp cool air, which set our minds energized to think through the meaning of a “river”.

It was an informal, get to know you session as well, with each of us, revealing a side of us which was very much uninhibited – the artistic side of each of us revealed. Some of us drew, bold, strong colours; whilst some of us dotted our paintings with brilliant colours, while others drew very symmetrical sceneries.

The daylight slowly began to fade, as we sat painting in the dark, with the intensity of the wind blowing even harder, and our bodies chilled to the bone.

“Hey, we have to go in to eat dinner already. S has prepared a real feast for us. Steamboat!” said our chief coordinator for the trip, SC.

And so, we quickly wrapped up, not too happy that we couldn’t improve further on each of our masterpiece, but happy enough to know that – we painted. Yes we did! We were painters in our own right! And gasps of admiration flowed, with each painting being a beautiful piece of work!

We headed into the warm enclave of the Johore bungalow at Fraser’s Hill, and sat down to tuck into homemade Hainanese steamboat. For RM 32.00 per person, we had a feast! It was homemade, Yong tau foo, bitter gourd, brinjal and taufoo stuffed with fish cake, limitless amounts of vegetable, mee hoon, sliced beef, chicken, fish and eggs to be dipped and boiled in herbal soup. Delicious is the word! And in the cold, cool air of Frasers, steamboat just topped our night like a well placed cherry! Plus, we didn’t have to do the dishes, so we were very happy campers.

Soon after dinner, whilst some went off to shower, others couldn’t help but to touch up on their master piece. Took out our wooden palletes dipped our brushes into water, and started improving on our masterpiece. I revamped my “bunch of flowers” into fields of flowers. A gave my river a bit of a punch, with more texture, and revamped the mountains. Though, my sun still looked like Armageddon instead of a normal setting sun!

All in all, it was a fun time, with parting words from L, our headmaster saying “Aiyah. The painting session not enough lar. Need to do more. It’s like, you eat one seed of durian, it’s so fleshy and yummy, and then you stop. You can’t even go to the next one. It’s like – just not ‘shiok’”.

And so, the first unofficial informal artmakr weekend, with the theme of “river”, was a really good experience for all of us, novices. We are all professionals by day, but yearn to be artists, with many hidden talents when given the chance to. It’s amazing to see the creativity and the hidden talents that each of us have.

Written by soyabeanmilk, a participant in the first ever artmakr weekend LIVE!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Acrylics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.