Retirement gives artistic talent chance to blossom

Above: Xi Songlin creates a painting of peonies in his own style.

Right: Xi teaches a pupil some of the skills required to paint the flowers.

Huang Hanting and Shen Li

I started without knowing anything of painting and now I can draw a beautiful peony. It is all owing to the teacher Xi.

After retiring many feel lost as they don’t know what to do with all the extra time they have.

Not so for Xi Songlin in Xiaomiao Village in Xuhang Town, Jiading District. He has found retirement a gateway to a new and beautiful world.

Xi, 65, has loved painting since he was a child. Before retirement, he was too busy to paint, but now his desire has returned and he is teaching himself Chinese painting.

In 2007, Xi bought a brush from street peddlers, dipped it into pigments, held his breath and made his first colorful stroke on a piece of rice paper.

The beginning was very difficult. He practiced repeatedly. He taught himself by looking at photos of Chinese paintings, yet he did not feel free to use the brush and colors.

One afternoon, while he was learning from a peony painting and, he unintentionally knocked over a glass and the water splashed onto the palette.

It mixed the red and white and formed a new pink color. He dipped his brush into the pink and casually painted a stroke.

It was perfect. Xi felt encouraged. Soon afterwards he had created his first peony flower painting on rice paper.

After years of practice, Xi has his own painting techniques. His peony paintings are bright and impressive.

In 2011, Gu Huizhen, 74, who lives in the same village asked Xi to teach her painting. Xi recalled how difficult it was when he started painting and he agreed.

One year’s later, in the calligraphy and painting contest of “Lifetime Learning Week” in Jiading, both the teacher and student received awards and the Xi’s school of peony won acclaim from the audience.

Sharing happiness with others is better than enjoying it alone. Every week, Xi will teach his peony painting style to a class of disabled people, who want to learn calligraphy and painting. Some of them have lost their fingers in accidents, some are deaf and others are difficult in controlling the brush.

Seeing that each student had his own difficulties, Xi has found a way to help them overcome their obstacles.

In the third class, student Dai Fangying tried to draw a peony, who became the first student in the class to make a whole painting of peony successfully.

“I started without knowing anything of painting and now I can draw a beautiful peony. It is all owing to the teacher Xi who spares no efforts in teaching,” Dai said.

Xi also likes to do handicrafts. One day his grandson gave him a difficult task — making a low-carbon handicraft. But what does “low-carbon” mean? It really troubled him at first. But after his grandson’s explanation, Xi understood its meaning. He asked his friend from the village to give him some dry straws, then he collected some cardboard, an old bamboo basket and waste cloth.

Days later, he created a 3D straw sculpture of “Old Man Fishing on the Bank” and a 3D cardboard sculpture of “Little Rabbit.”