Nobility and the art of being young

Color Edu's Study Tour took students to Florence, Italy. [Photo provided to China Daily]

A bowl of noodles or a piece of cloth draped over a bicycle shed are the simple kinds of things that can get the creative juices flowing

"Held high up against the sun, the violet bead of grape melts into a purple sea". Guan Yanfei wrote the lines when she was 12, for the thick album of paintings published in memory of art, in the way she saw it, as her first love.

Two years have passed since then. Today Yanfei is still fond of using sunlight as a metaphor, in an effort to describe the thrill and enchantment of a creative process, feelings that are almost beyond words.

"I felt like water, blended with the oil that was my paint," she says. "Together we rolled down the canvass in large drops, reflective of the sunlight that fills the room."

Indeed, oil is her favorite medium, as the collection of her light-soaked works demonstrate. The colors are heaped onto the canvass, probably by a paint knife, to create a matte surface full of tension, texture and a creative maelstrom. In short, they are mood paintings.

And it is this mood-recording process of art making that Wang Wei, founder of Color Edu, is determined to show to his young students. "Strokes and sentiments - they are inseparable," says the 34-year-old, who founded his own children's art education center after spending a decade in the industry.

"I chose gouache for my youngest students - four or five-year-olds - instead of the more commonly used watercolor or Chinese ink because gouache is less free-flowing and so is easier to control for a child. Its quality also means that it is more capable of documenting the entire creative process than many other media. Every stroke and every dab is visible from the final work, even those first painted and later regretted. I want the connection between a child and what he or she paints to be more visceral and palpable. In this way the child learns to express him or herself through art." (The oil classes are available for children aged 8 and above.)