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WATERCOLOURIST RETREAT

Like to practice or refine your watercolour painting skills in a setting that inspires a natural muse? Let our art teacher – a practicing artist and art lecturer at a university in Chengdu – lead you on a watercolour painting and coaching trip to small villages in a variety of settings in the mountains of Sichuan. We use an art teacher who has been painting a range of places in Sichuan – natural, cultural, historical, or just snippets of daily life – for thirty years, and he’s intimately familiar with the best locations in the province (Sichuan province is as large as Spain).

The trip will mostly take us to small villages that are nestled in lush mountains. There are four different areas that are considered the best overall milieus by the art instructor, and these three areas are the following: 

Ya’an villages and other points south

A scattering of hamlets set in rich subtropical mountains, villages in the south of the province are largely made up of handsome wooden houses set amid evocative alleyways. Some village squares has old opera houses, and lots of bustle – farmer eating exotic foods in rustic eateries, colourful farmers’ market, and so on. The villages are surrounded by gurgling streams, which are channeled through the alleys (designed as such so that in the old times each household would have fresh water running outside the house). Elegant stone arched bridges span the streams, leading to a tapestry of fields and even smaller hamlets, all of which hold farmhouses ensconced among spurts of bamboo, tapestries of fields and open-channel irrigation system, and rural scenery that can keep you painting busily for days on end if you like. The imagery is quaint and timeless – a perfect playground for watercolourists.

Sichuan basin villages

There are various villages within remarkably short distance from Chengdu in the Sichuan basin that also make excellent locales for watercolourists. One of these is the New Year painting village, the place that gave rise to one of China’s top four subgenres of the so-called “New Year Paintings” – they are called as such because traditionally people made the paintings during new year period. It’s a village of charming, old-style farmhouses houses covered by white stucco, and on the exteriors of the houses there are the famous “new year paintings”. The folk paintings depict children doing folksy everyday things such as harvesting or fishing, and yet they have clever symbolism – they symbolise virtues such as happiness, bounty, harmony, prosperity, humbleness, and so on. The village is surrounded by agricultural land, and the area is renowned for its orchards of pears, peaches, loquat, and plantations of tea.

Qiang Tibetan villages

The Tibetan-Qiang villages along the Mingjiang River valley are a great playground for watercolourists. These villages are normally located in steep slopes, made up of tight-knit fabric of alleyways hemmed in by stone houses constructed from slate. There are endless subjects and angles for watercolourists here: the alleyways, the unique farmhouses, architectural features, outlandishly dressed inhabitants (they wear colourful costumes), Buddhist decorative and religious features such as prayer flags and household shrines, and the inhabitants engage in a variety of quaint customs that make ideal subjects. And also the larger setting: the sweeping valleys, the orchards and semi-arid mountain scenery, the villages set in the Himalayas, and some villages have the famous ancient turrets that people formerly build as places to lock themselves in during times of war or raids by bandits; these towers now make great unique features among the houses, fields, or even on high ridges.

Han peasant villages

A variety of villages in north-central Sichuan have houses that date back to the Ming Dynasty – their exteriors are covered in white stucco, their slanted roofs have traditional tiles, the doors and windows display geometric cutout-designs, and the porches are framed by wooden columns. These houses and villages are inhabited by farmers who toil in the rich mountain land, and the mountains tumbling in every direction are normally shrouded in mist. You can stay with the farmers in their farmhouses and paint the houses, the people, the larger setting, as well as the features of daily life in the farm and in the house – the kitchens, with their wood-fire hearth and slabs of pork dangling from the ceiling to smoke and dry are particularly evocative.

The areas mentioned above are broadly-speaking our favoured locales for watercolourists. Our watercolourists’ tours are of course fully customizable. The trips are open for people across all ranges of proficiency in painting watercolours; the professional and experienced instructor can adjust the level of instruction according to the level and desire of each particular participant or group.

Once you let us know the parameters of the tour – including desired class and level of accommodation and other logistical choices – we can match you up with something that fits your tastes and budget. 

Start & Finish: Chengdu

Trip Logistics: In this trip, we can fix the destinations depending on the levels of luxury or ruggedness – as well as the exoticness – that you desire. Destinations are also determined by the duration of the trip: we can take you on a watercolourists’ retreat for a weekend at least, or it can be a much longer trip.

Experienced Watercolourists: If you already have a high level of competence, then you can treat the instructor as an equal, spending some time painting together and learning from one another. Or you could also do this trip without an instructor, which will of course be cheaper.

Art Instructor: The instructor is Zhang Zhao Fang, an artist who paints oil on canvas as well as watercolour on sketch paper for various clients. He supplements his income by teaching at an art college in Chengdu and also to private students at his studio. Zhang doesn’t have a website that we can link to here; examples of his work can be sent to interested participants on request.