Lok How Yuan WATERCOLOR My formal art learning started with pencil and charcoal drawing, watercolour and oil painting. Under the influence of the late Mr. Tew Nai Tong, I had slowly developed the drawing and painting approach just like his style. There in the art institute, I was later introduced by Mr. Chung Chen Sun into Chinese ink & brush painting and as well as some modern art ideologies, and watercolour painting had been put aside. When in my further study in USA, it was through my late tutor Robert Colescott that leaded me into the exploration of acrylic painting, and immediately was very fond of its very versatile hues and eminent tactility. I worked on this medium for more than 3 decades, throughout my art teaching career. Just right before my retirement from the university teaching, I was assigned to teach watercolour painting. It was this time that I came back to resume watercolour painting. I then had 3 years of watercolour painting teaching experiences and explored into this media by all means. As I had been teaching mostly lecture-base courses in most of my career with art institutions, I felt that it was like an exile into the freedom in my minds-cape, or a compensation in my creative urge. It is entirely a non-tactile kind of art. Though I painted mostly portraits and figures in watercolour painting teaching, my most favourable subjects are landscapes and trees, without much artificial or man-made themes. In watercolour painting, I could indulge my mind into a state of sublimation with the mystic fluidity of water, vaporization, absorption of the paper, and the emergence of the images when the water subsiding, and leaving the pigment there. The whole process in watercolour painting is magical. 2021
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