Artist Wan Longsheng 自由色彩，万龙生 (1871578078): Rural Memory and Oil Landscapes
The scaffolding has just come down from the end wall of a village house. Where there was bare render there is now a field of rapeseed in full flower, a dirt path winding through it toward flooded paddies, a farmer leading a buffalo along a ridge, and green hills under a summer sky. A heap of building sand still sits at the foot of the wall. A neighbour walks past with a basket.
The Artist
Wan Longsheng — 万龙生, who works as 自由色彩, “Free Colors” — is a professional painter based in Jiangxi. By his own account he has been painting for thirty years, and for most of that time his real work has been teaching: in person, in a studio, with students at an easel beside him. He describes what he offers plainly — solid fundamentals, long experience of hands-on teaching, and the aim of helping students paint better and see better.
His paintings come in two kinds. There are the walls: large murals on the gable ends of rural houses, painted with a team, of the countryside the houses stand in. And there are the canvases: oil landscapes, painted by hand in the studio, of waterfalls, rivers, forests and mountains at dawn.
Harvest Season, From Memory
The walls he cares most about show 农忙时节, the busy farming season. He paints them as memories. 儿时场景历历在目, he writes of them: the scenes of childhood still vivid before his eyes. And of the harvest wall: 已经回不去的过往, a past you can’t go back to. What he puts on the walls of today’s villages is the village as it was when he was a boy — people in the fields, everyone working at once.
The flooded-field mural runs the length of a long wall along a terrace. It starts almost empty: a pale sheet of blue-white water, with the dark lines of the field ridges ruled across it in perspective so they narrow toward the far hills. Then the life goes in, field by field. One plot becomes a seedbed of brilliant green. A red rice-transplanting machine works one paddy; in another, farmers bend to plant by hand, laying out long green strips of seedlings. A pond with lily pads opens in the foreground, trees and bushes break the long horizontal, and the water in every field holds a little of the sky.
It is a clever subject for a wall. Flooded paddies are mostly flat reflected light, which lets a huge area be covered quickly in broad, simple color, and puts all the detail — the people, the machine, the green seedlings — into small spots where the eye goes looking for it.
How a Wall Is Built
The harvest wall shows the method from the start. The whole field goes on first as one flat block of yellow, with a band of blue hills and a band of sky above it, nothing more. Then the field is turned from yellow into ripe rice: stalks drawn up in darker ochre at the front, cut stubble in brown, the color cooling and flattening toward the hills. Workers go in last, cutting and carrying, with a small threshing machine in the middle of the field and a clear stream running across the front of the wall.
Several painters work along the wall at the same time, each sitting on a low stool or standing with a tray of colors at his feet. The real doors and windows of the house are part of the picture: the painting runs right up to their frames, and a small door can end up standing in the middle of a field. An old man from the village stands and watches for a while, one hand on his chin.
In the Studio
Indoors the scale changes and the pace slows. A river landscape on a big canvas sits on a wooden easel: tall trees on the far bank, their reflections broken in the dark water, a figure and an animal small on the far shore. The work at the front is grass — clumps of it, green at the root and russet at the tip, each blade a single upward flick of a fine brush. The palette beside it is heaped with soft mounds of color, mixed and remixed so many times it has become a painting of its own.
Turning the Canvas Round
His studio is lined from floor to ceiling with finished landscapes, hung edge to edge. In front of that wall the new paintings are shown in the same simple way: a blank-looking stretcher, back to front on a wooden easel, is turned round, and the picture is there.
A snow scene turns round as a mountain glittering above a turquoise pool, with every pine and bush along the water heavy with white. An autumn painting turns round as a boardwalk zigzagging across still water toward misty blue mountains, with golden trees on both banks and their reflections lying in the water below. The colors are clear and bright, the light is warm, and the composition always gives you a way in: a path, a boardwalk, a stream bank.
White Water
Waterfalls are where his patience shows. Close up, the brush works on the foliage around the falls one small dab at a time — leaf clusters, mossy rocks, a few pale flowers. The water itself is built of thin streaks of white over blue-grey, left lighter where the fall catches the sun, and the pool at the bottom turns a deep, bright green against the mist. The finished canvas lies flat on the studio floor, a forest and a waterfall about the size of a small door.
Eighty by One Hundred and Twenty
He names his canvases by their size: 布面油画，尺寸80-120 — oil on canvas, 80 by 120 centimetres. Others are 80 by 100, or 60 by 80. It is a practical, plain way to describe a painting, the way a framer or a buyer would, and it says something about how he sees the work: as a real object for a real wall, measured and made by hand.
The phrase that goes with them is less plain: 带你走进画里, I’ll take you into the painting. That is the design principle of nearly every canvas. A sunset waterfall sets a golden sky and pink mountains behind a fall pouring into a still pool, with the light reflected across the water toward you. A tall pine stands over a valley, a dirt path running past its roots and down the slope. There is always a way in — water to stand at the edge of, or a path to walk.
The Teacher
Teaching is where his thirty years go now. His studio takes students with no background at all — 零基础, zero foundation — and starts them by copying finished paintings. It is the oldest method there is, and for landscapes like his it works well: by repeating a painting stroke by stroke, a beginner learns how a sky is laid in, how a tree is built from dark to light, and how a path is made to turn into the distance.
He is proud of them. One student came from Hunan to learn, and Wan Longsheng was openly delighted that the very first painting this student copied in the studio came out so well. Of another student’s copy he asked, only half joking, whether it might be good enough to graduate.
Pink Skies and Flowering Paths
The later canvases grow softer. A pink sunrise floats over layers of blue mountain, with mist filling the valleys between them and flowering shrubs in the foreground. A winding path runs beneath arches of pink and violet blossom, the light opening at the far end — painted close up with a fine brush, flower by flower, until the path looks like somewhere you could walk.
The walls and the canvases look like two different trades, but they come from the same place: a painter who grew up with harvests and flooded fields, has painted for thirty years, and now spends his days teaching other people to make a picture you can step into.
See his work on Douyin: 自由色彩，万龙生 (1871578078) · rapeseed village wall · flooded-field mural · harvest mural · forest waterfall. All artwork and video © 万龙生, shown with credit.