Preserving culture of oil painting a necessity, says Sarawak Artists Society founding member

Bong previews his oil paintings to reporters before the launch on May 13.

KUCHING (May 11): Raising awareness for the need to preserve the culture of oil painting is a necessity because of a lack of new young artists wanting to explore the medium, said Sarawak Artists Society (SAS) founding member Bong Choo Chew.

According to Bong, oil painters are scarce as the process of doing an art piece from oil colours is time-consuming and tedious with harmful chemicals when not taking the necessary requirements to protect one’s safety.

“You have to wait four days for the paint to dry. Youngsters nowadays don’t have the patience; they want to paint as fast as they can,” he said to reporters at a preview of his latest exhibition at Hoan Gallery, La Promenade Mall yesterday.

He said he paints up to four canvases at one time to reduce time constraints whilst waiting for the oil colour to dry.

“While waiting for a piece to dry, I move onto another canvas, painting up to four pieces at a time so as to not waste any time.

“By the time I have finished working on the fourth piece, my first piece is dry and ready for another layer of oil colours,” he said.

Additionally, Bong said that youngsters paint with other mediums such as acrylic, a fast-drying paint, to produce and sell their pieces faster than that of oil colour to generate faster income revenue.

“That is a wrong concept. That is why most paintings nowadays are not artistic, it’s only a decoration,” he said.

He believes that an artist’s primary motive should be to seek and produce a style unique to them as a means of expressing themselves.

“You must paint from your heart with strong character to show that you are really an artist. Artists carry weight, but painters merely paint for money,” he said.

Bong hopes to encourage and teach local youth interested in oil painting to preserve the culture as a medium of expressive art.

His exhibition ‘Dialogue With Our Nature’ will start on May 13.

‘Dialogue With Our Nature’ is Bong’s first solo art show in two decades featuring over 50 oil paintings presenting pieces from the 1990s, depicting nostalgic scenes of markets, traders and shoppers with highly detailed paintings of fishes and his recent abstracts produced this year.

For more information, visit hoangallery.com, lapromenademall.com.my or search @HoanArtGallery and @LaPromenadeMall.

from Borneo Post Online https://ift.tt/phzBWnl
via IFTTT