singapore scenery - Oil Painting

I think Fort Canning Hill is the ideal location for capturing the beauty of the island and a hike in the hill always feels good when I'm feeling unmotivated. The hill offers numerous viewpoints; the green trails, the light and shadows necessary for painting, and simply looking down at the surroundings below make you feel little and vulnerable. I also find hills' naturally occurring lower and higher terrain formations appealing, which are typically lacking in flat street scenes. While I still have a number of compositions to work from, I can continue to look for more viewpoints to put together 36 or 72 paintings of Fort Canning Hill. Anyway, as Selegie is close to the hill, I can go for a walk whenever I want.

A morning stroll around Mount Emily Park in Mount Sophia is now an option since moving to the Selegie flat. I also periodically go around Mount Sophia when I want to view the neighborhood and get additional exercise. To get uphill to Mount Emily Park, I can take Sophia Road somewhere around the junction of Selegie Road, then cross over to Wilkie Road to go downhill. By the way, The Istana, the president's official residence and office, is located at the end of the road; when I was a student at the NAFA's San San Campus on Mount Sophia, I used to see guards patrolling the site and I later found out that the President is one of our neighbors. Also, while going around Mount Sophia, I noticed that the streets mostly use English names including Mackenzie Road, Cavengah Road, and Cuppage Road, and so forth. I eventually reach the green space at the entrance to the Istana, where intertwining rain trees provide both a view and shade, after walking east for around 10 minutes from Orchar...

When we were young, a trip to visit my grandma with my mother would excite us a lot. We'd say we were heading to Rochor or downtown. My grandma's house was along Beach Road, and to the east of it was the business district, while to the west, across the street, was the Rochor River, which crosses the Merdeka Bridge before merging with the Kallang and Singapore rivers and flowing into the sea. I have fond recollections of this stretch of the river near the Merdeka Bridge because my father's workplace was close to my grandma's house, he occasionally took us downstairs to the coffee shop for soft drinks and then to the river to play. Like the small fishing villages in neighboring countries are now, the Rochor river was a dusty and chaotic place fifty years ago; a chaotic yet relaxed place where many laborers gathered to make a living from the sea. The most startling aspect was how close the “primitive” toilets were to the river; urine and stools would drop from above and ru...

It was this year that I began painting landscapes, initially to capture the constantly changing clouds. As I painted, the proportion of the sky shrank, and the lovely clouds also shrank. In addition, as I looked through photos to find a suitable composition, I saw that most of them had trees and green grass; I often see these mature old trees in parks or by the roadside as I walk around the city and wonder, “How old is that tree?”. According to statistics, trees take 15 to 80 years to fully grow and then continue to live for a very long time. Every tree also is different, each with its own distinct bends, twisted branches, and lush green leaves. I therefore decided that each painting needed at least one tree. Soon, the paintings became more cool colored, with cobalt violet, viridian, and cerulean blue being the most common. The island is known as a garden city, and I completely agree because Singapore has planted over two million trees in the last 50 years.

Mural painting has recently grown in popularity on the island and is commonly seen as a development of graffiti art, a type of street art that originated in the West in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, Malaysia was where realistically drawn murals initially gained popularity before spreading to Singapore. On my earlier visits to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, I saw people spray-painting graffiti on the walls of vast canals or overpasses; letterings and some simple drawings, including portraits, were accentuated with vibrant spray paint. The same acts, however, were hardly ever seen in Singapore at the time; maybe the authorities had not yet realized the appeal of graffiti art. Furthermore, unauthorized graffiti equated to vandalism, which was punishable. Today, anyone walking down the street can appreciate the island's many wall murals; some have even evolved into landmarks to help people find their ways around. Murals, on the other hand, are more prone to weather damage than...

While walking through Little India in search of breakfast, I find myself passing many back alleys. Some are only accessible by foot, while others are also accessible by car. We try to stay away from back alleys because they are often unpleasant due to junk build-up, unless when photographing old buildings in Little India; many of the buildings date back to the early 20th century and are regarded as island monuments. You can also see engravings of sacred animals, auspicious symbols, and verses on several of the double-storey houses that were once owned by the Peranakan. Recently, we noticed that Desker Road is right in front of the Indian cuisine café where we had our breakfast, an alley which, along with Geylang is infamous for being part of Singapore's red-light districts, and where customer solicitation once stretched throughout the entire back alleyways; I wonder if such acts still take place, considering that streetwalkers are rarely seen out and about these days. Years ago, I ...