關於 canvas painting supplies ，我們在網路上蒐集到這些相關的討論、資訊與評價

行动管制令第……

孩子已经20多天足不出户。
他们每天早睡早醒，吃，喝，玩，乐，坏蛋一下，在屋子里从大门窜到后院，一楼二楼跑上跑下….除了偶尔抢东西哭闹，其余时候尽都是欢乐声。
孩子的世界没有昨天或明天，只有当下。
他们觉得很幸福，因为几乎每一天的24小时，爸妈都在他们身边，这对现代的孩子而言，是多么奢侈的事。

而我呢？
这突如其来的瘟疫让人不自觉焦虑起来，但也因为行动管制令待在家闭关，减低杂念，心里渐渐平静下来。
焦虑时心里时时祈福，平静后也时时祈福，这两者间的心念一样，但心境不一样。

我把家里一大一小冰箱都囤积满满的食物，孩子学校的家长很热心，帮群组里的妈妈们订购活力农耕蔬菜和水果。
这时候还能吃到高原活力农耕农夫用心种植的蔬菜，心里感动万分。
每一次收到蔬菜箱，一打开，感觉好像能闻得到高山大地的味道，摸着蔬菜，都能感觉泥土的温暖。

好友说她年轻的侄子和太太都在前线工作，两个年轻的生命，还有很多很多的前线人员，不分昼夜，在为全国人民尽他们最大的努力，控制疫情。
他们的每一天都在极大的挑战中渡过，每次想到他们，我就告诉自己“我要尽自己最大的努力乖乖待在家，好好过日子。”

每天，只有当下，没有等一下特别急的事，没有明天要赶着去完成的事，于是…………可以安然的打开冰箱，以非常珍惜存库里食物的心，细细的计划着早餐，午餐，孩子下午点心，晚餐….，在平常的料理中来点不一样的创意（因为食材有限），然后非常享受那个可以全然投入在为自己和家人烹饪的时光。
那个迎着晨光熬黑米粥，吹着午后热风做pizza，或在雷雨咆哮声中炒菜，煎蛋……的时光，都是那么那么的美好。
有人说烹饪时的情绪很重要，那是一种能量，这个能量伴着食物一起被享用者吸收，吸收到他的身，心，灵。
怪不得，我总是觉得外婆和妈妈做的菜特别好吃，因为她们都带着慈悲的心煮每一道菜肴。

在家画画的画室间有一个落地玻璃门，门前不远有一棵大树，一棵喜欢在风中起舞，在雨中飘来淡淡翠绿味，在夜里细语的大树。
当我在画布上无尽地延续生命的线条时，它在那儿陪伴着我，静静地微笑。
每一幅画里都是我和自己展开的对话…..。

每隔几天，就和家乡的爸妈，弟弟弟媳们视讯，搞笑逗乐他们一下。
每天都传自己煮的好料照片给妈妈看，然后炫耀说自己煮得比她好，青出于蓝（我特爱跟我妈开玩笑）。

每天总有些时候，静静坐着，闭上眼，听听大地的声音。
平时的车辆声减少了，于是鸟叫和虫鸣变得更清澈。

在这安下心过好当下的日子里，我还能做些什么呢？
小黄花慈善教育基金会的两个中心因为行动管制令，也同时关闭了。
我们都担心本来已经是低收入户的家庭，在这段时间可能还要面临零收入的困境，于是小黄花的员工待在家里开始致电每个家庭慰问他们的情况，然后为这些家庭订购足够一家大小的食物，确保他们至少可以温饱。
孩子学校的老师因某个亲戚是前线医护人员，而得知医院缺乏医疗防护用品，于是孩子学校善良的家长们决定募款购买防护用品捐赠医院。
最后在和老师详细沟通之后，我决定由小黄花发起这项募款项目，让更多人知道这件事，让更多都想为疫情付出的人民一起集合力量来帮助前线人员。
学校的家长们有的帮忙张罗订购防护用品，还有一些一起动手做起手工艺品义卖筹款….而募款反应非常热烈，家人，亲戚，邻居，朋友甚至国外朋友，各界人士都出力支持。
前几天新闻报道有一个家庭，爸妈和小孩在空无一人的公园里呆坐在石椅上，警方上前询问才发现，这一家人家里连米都没有，已经好几天没吃东西了。
警察人员自掏腰包给他们买食物。
我看到这则新闻，眼泪真的快掉出来。
于是我们（小黄花）马上透过两个贫民区域中心孩子的家长致电询问其他需要帮助的家庭，食物提供从33个家庭一下子增加到151个家庭。

我们不知道未来将会放生什么样的事，我们只能好好的珍惜活着的每一刻，好好爱自己，爱身边的人，爱这个大家一起共存的地球村。
有时候有些事情的发生是要我们安静下来聆听某一些生命的声音。
这段时间我又看到了好一段时间没看见的蜻蜓飞进家里，孩子兴奋的追着它边跑边跳。
平时只在树上停歇的鸟儿，飞到院子的草上散步，松鼠在汽车稀少的马路上大摇大摆。

我们继续祈福疫情尽早结束，继续勇敢抗疫，继续互相扶持，继续在这段安静下来的时间沉淀。

让我们用爱来化解这一场战役。

The …. days of MCO

The kids have not gone out for about 20 days.
Everyday they are sleeping and waking up early. Their daily activities are all about eating, drinking, playing mischievously, looming around from the entrance till the backyard, running across the floors in the house. Most of the times they are filled with joys and laughter, except occasionally crying of fighting for toys.

In the innocent children world, there is no yesterday or today, but at the moment. They are embraced by happiness because their parents are with them almost 24 hours in a day. This is literally a luxurious for the modern era children.

What about myself?
This sudden pandemic makes people feeling unconsciously anxiety. Despite of that, my heart gradually calmed down and distractions are reduced because of retreating myself at home during the Movement Control Order. Pray humbly when panic of anxiety attacks or even tranquillity. The two state of minds are the same, but the mood is distinct.

I have stocked up the fridges with load of foods, the parents of my kid’s school are very thoughtful, they are helping other mothers to purchase the organic farmed vegetables and fruits. Having to eat the organic vegetables and fruits farmed by the farmers at this very difficult time, it had deeply touched my heart.
Every time when I receive the vegetables box, it reminisces me the good nature of the high mountain and the warmth of soil.

A good friend of mine told me her nephew and wife are working at the frontline, joining along with many other frontliners, working very hard day and night for the nation to strive the Corona virus.
They are living their day in a hard challenge, whenever I think of them, I will tell myself to stay at home and live my live to the best.

We have plenty of time in day as we away from a busy pace of life. Thus, I may unhurried to open up the fridge, with the heart full of appreciation towards the foods to plan the breakfast, lunch, teatime and dinner menu for the kids. Creativity is what I need to spice up the meals (due to the shortage of ingredients) and fully enjoying the preparation time of foods for myself and family.

Cooking the black rice porridge at the welcoming morning light, baking pizza with the afternoon breeze or frying egg or vegetables during the thunderstorm seems to be like the very best moments in life.

Someone said that emotion is important during cooking because that good energy will be going along with the foods, while the people enjoying the foods can absorb all these good energies to nurture the body, mind and soul.

I always feel that the foods prepared by my grandmother and mother is exceptionally delicious and the reason is that they are preparing the foods with compassion.

I can see a big tree outside through the ceiling glass from my painting studio. It likes to dance in the wind, pouring with good scent of greenery during the rain, and talking softly at night.
When I continue to create the lines on the painting canvas, the tree is there to accompanying and returning smiles to me.
Each painting is the conversation and monologue between me myself and I.

Every few days, I will be video calling my parents, my brothers & my sisters in-law, making fun and bring laughter to them.
I send my food photos to my mother everyday and telling her I am the better cook (of course I am only joking to my mom).

There are some hours in a day, I will be sitting peacefully, closing my eyes to listen to the voices of the surroundings.
The cars are getting lesser these days, so the bird and worms chirpings are more audible.

In such a peaceful days, what else more I can do?
The two branches of Little Yellow Flower Foundation had temporarily ceased operation due to MCO.
We are worrying particularly for the low-income family because they will not able to generate income during the MCO. Staffs from the Foundation started to caretaking and prepared foods to make sure that they are able to cope with the difficult time.
The teacher in the kid’s school get to know that hospital is running out of medical supplies. Hence, the kind parents started fund raising to donate medical supplies to the hospital.
After discussed with the teacher, I decided to raise fund and to create public awareness through the Little Yellow Flower Foundation.
The parents in the school providing their kindness by sourcing medical supply, and some even made handcraft to seek donations. The fund raising had received tremendous responds from the community including those who are living abroad. Everybody show their best support on the fund raising.
There was a news saying that a family of 3 were sitting at the bench in the park. They have been starving for 3 days and a kind police bought them foods.
When I get to know this news, my tears almost burst out.
Thus, our Foundation took immediate effort to reach out more unprivileged families the food supplies and helps, this had extended from the initial 33 families and now a total of 151 families are covered with the helps from the Foundation.

We are unable to predict the future, but we may cherish and live every moments of our life. Love yourself, loving people that around you and also love the mother earth.
Sometimes we need to unwind and quiet down ourselves and to listen to voice of the nature.
During the time, I have seen dragonfly flying around the house after so long, the kids were chasing it up and down happily. The birds that normally resting on the tree are roaming at grass of the yard, the squirrels swaying freely on the road with lesser cars.

Let’s pray for the pandemic to end as soonest, continue to bravely fight the Corona virus by supporting each other as well as taking the chance of this quiet time to collect your thoughts.

Let us resolve this battle with love.

#馬來西亞行動管制令
#我的小日子
#乖乖待在家
#malaysiamco
#mylittlejourney
#pleasestayathome

Nobody’s Fool　　( January 2011 )

Yoshitomo Nara

Do people look to my childhood for sources of my imagery? Back then, the snow-covered fields of the north were about as far away as you could get from the rapid economic growth happening elsewhere. Both my parents worked and my brothers were much older, so the only one home to greet me when I got back from elementary school was a stray cat we’d taken in. Even so, this was the center of my world. In my lonely room, I would twist the radio dial to the American military base station and out blasted rock and roll music. One of history’s first man-made satellites revolved around me up in the night sky. There I was, in touch with the stars and radio waves.

It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how a lonely childhood in such surroundings might give rise to the sensibility in my work. In fact, I also used to believe in this connection. I would close my eyes and conjure childhood scenes, letting my imagination amplify them like the music coming from my speakers.

But now, past the age of fifty and more cool-headed, I’ve begun to wonder how big a role childhood plays in making us who we are as adults. Looking through reproductions of the countless works I’ve made between my late twenties and now, I get the feeling that childhood experiences were merely a catalyst. My art derives less from the self-centered instincts of childhood than from the day-to-day sensory experiences of an adult who has left this realm behind. And, ultimately, taking the big steps pales in importance to the daily need to keep on walking.

While I was in high school, before I had anything to do with art, I worked part-time in a rock café. There I became friends with a graduate student of mathematics who one day started telling me, in layman’s terms, about his major in topology. His explanation made the subject seem less like a branch of mathematics than some fascinating organic philosophy. My understanding is that topology offers you a way to discover the underlying sameness of countless, seemingly disparate, forms. Conversely, it explains why many people, when confronted with apparently identical things, will accept a fake as the genuine article. I later went on to study art, live in Germany, and travel around the world, and the broader perspective I’ve gained has shown me that topology has long been a subtext of my thinking. The more we add complexity, the more we obscure what is truly valuable. Perhaps the reason I began, in the mid-90s, trying to make paintings as simple as possible stems from that introduction to topology gained in my youth.

As a kid listening to U.S. armed-forces radio, I had no idea what the lyrics meant, but I loved the melody and rhythm of the music. In junior high school, my friends and I were already discussing rock and roll like credible music critics, and by the time I started high school, I was hanging out in rock coffee shops and going to live shows. We may have been a small group of social outcasts, but the older kids, who smoked cigarettes and drank, talked to us all night long about movies they’d seen or books they’d read. If the nighttime student quarter had been the school, I’m sure I would have been a straight-A student.

In the 80s, I left my hometown to attend art school, where I was anything but an honors student. There, a model student was one who brought a researcher’s focus to the work at hand. Your bookshelves were stacked with catalogues and reference materials. When you weren’t working away in your studio, you were meeting with like-minded classmates to discuss art past and present, including your own. You were hoping to set new trends in motion. Wholly lacking any grand ambition, I fell well short of this model, with most of my paintings done to satisfy class assignments. I was, however, filling every one of my notebooks, sketchbooks, and scraps of wrapping paper with crazy, graffiti-like drawings.

Looking back on my younger days—Where did where all that sparkling energy go? I used the money from part-time jobs to buy record albums instead of art supplies and catalogues. I went to movies and concerts, hung out with my girlfriend, did funky drawings on paper, and made midnight raids on friends whose boarding-room lights still happened to be on. I spent the passions of my student days outside the school studio. This is not to say I wasn’t envious of the kids who earned the teachers’ praise or who debuted their talents in early exhibitions. Maybe envy is the wrong word. I guess I had the feeling that we were living in separate worlds. Like puffs of cigarette smoke or the rock songs from my speaker, my adolescent energies all vanished in the sky.

Being outside the city and surrounded by rice fields, my art school had no art scene to speak of—I imagined the art world existing in some unknown dimension, like that of TV or the movies. At the time, art could only be discussed in a Western context, and, therefore, seemed unreal. But just as every country kid dreams of life in the big city, this shaky art-school student had visions of the dazzling, far-off realm of contemporary art. Along with this yearning was an equally strong belief that I didn’t deserve admittance to such a world. A typical provincial underachiever!

I did, however, love to draw every day and the scrawled sketches, never shown to anybody, started piling up. Like journal entries reflecting the events of each day, they sometimes intersected memories from the past. My little everyday world became a trigger for the imagination, and I learned to develop and capture the imagery that arose. I was, however, still a long way off from being able to translate those countless images from paper to canvas.

Visions come to us through daydreams and fantasies. Our emotional reaction towards these images makes them real. Listening to my record collection gave me a similar experience. Before the Internet, the precious little information that did exist was to be found in the two or three music magazines available. Most of my records were imported—no liner notes or lyric sheets in Japanese. No matter how much I liked the music, living in a non-English speaking world sadly meant limited access to the meaning of the lyrics. The music came from a land of societal, religious, and subcultural sensibilities apart from my own, where people moved their bodies to it in a different rhythm. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I never got tired of poring over every inch of the record jackets on my 12-inch vinyl LPs. I took the sounds and verses into my body. Amidst today’s superabundance of information, choosing music is about how best to single out the right album. For me, it was about making the most use of scant information to sharpen my sensibilities, imagination, and conviction. It might be one verse, melody, guitar riff, rhythmic drum beat or bass line, or record jacket that would inspire me and conjure up fresh imagery. Then, with pencil in hand, I would draw these images on paper, one after the other. Beyond good or bad, the pictures had a will of their own, inhabiting the torn pages with freedom and friendliness.

By the time I graduated from university, my painting began to approach the independence of my drawing. As a means for me to represent a world that was mine and mine alone, the paintings may not have been as nimble as the drawings, but I did them without any preliminary sketching. Prizing feelings that arose as I worked, I just kept painting and over-painting until I gained a certain freedom and the sense, though vague at the time, that I had established a singular way of putting images onto canvas. Yet, I hadn’t reached the point where I could declare that I would paint for the rest of my life.

After receiving my undergraduate degree, I entered the graduate school of my university and got a part-time job teaching at an art yobiko—a prep school for students seeking entrance to an art college. As an instructor, training students how to look at and compose things artistically, meant that I also had to learn how to verbalize my thoughts and feelings. This significant growth experience not only allowed me to take stock of my life at the time, but also provided a refreshing opportunity to connect with teenage hearts and minds.

And idealism! Talking to groups of art students, I naturally found myself describing the ideals of an artist. A painful experience for me—I still had no sense of myself as an artist. The more the students showed their affection for me, the more I felt like a failed artist masquerading as a sensei (teacher). After completing my graduate studies, I kept working as a yobiko instructor. And in telling students about the path to becoming an artist, I began to realize that I was still a student myself, with many things yet to learn. I felt that I needed to become a true art student. I decided to study in Germany. The day I left the city where I had long lived, many of my students appeared on the platform to see me off.

Life as a student in Germany was a happy time. I originally intended to go to London, but for economic reasons chose a tuition-free, and, fortunately, academism-free German school. Personal approaches coexisted with conceptual ones, and students tried out a wide range of modes of expression. Technically speaking, we were all students, but each of us brought a creator’s spirit to the fore. The strong wills and opinions of the local students, though, were well in place before they became artists thanks to the German system of early education. As a reticent foreign student from a far-off land, I must have seemed like a mute child. I decided that I would try to make myself understood not through words, but through having people look at my pictures. When winter came and leaden clouds filled the skies, I found myself slipping back to the winters of my childhood. Forgoing attempts to speak in an unknown language, I redoubled my efforts to express myself through visions of my private world. Thinking rather than talking, then illustrating this thought process in drawings and, finally, realizing it in a painting. Instead of defeating you in an argument, I wanted to invite you inside me. Here I was, in a most unexpected place, rediscovering a value that I thought I had lost—I felt that I had finally gained the ability to learn and think, that I had become a student in the truest sense of the word.

But I still wasn’t your typical honors student. My paintings clearly didn’t look like contemporary art, and nobody would say my images fit in the context of European painting. They did, however, catch the gaze of dealers who, with their antennae out for young artists, saw my paintings as new objects that belonged less to the singular world of art and more to the realm of everyday life. Several were impressed by the freshness of my art, and before I knew it, I was invited to hold exhibitions in established galleries—a big step into a wider world.

The six years that I spent in Germany after completing my studies and before returning to Japan were golden days, both for me and my work. Every day and every night, I worked tirelessly to fix onto canvas all the visions that welled up in my head. My living space/studio was in a dreary, concrete former factory building on the outskirts of Cologne. It was the center of my world. Late at night, my surroundings were enveloped in darkness, but my studio was brightly lit. The songs of folk poets flowed out of my speakers. In that place, standing in front of the canvas sometimes felt like traveling on a solitary voyage in outer space—a lonely little spacecraft floating in the darkness of the void. My spaceship could go anywhere in this fantasy while I was painting, even to the edge of the universe.

Suddenly one day, I was flung outside—my spaceship was to be scrapped. My little vehicle turned back into an old concrete building, one that was slated for destruction because it was falling apart. Having lost the spaceship that had accompanied me on my lonely travels, and lacking the energy to look for a new studio, I immediately decided that I might as well go back to my homeland. It was painful and sad to leave the country where I had lived for twelve years and the handful of people I could call friends. But I had lost my ship. The only place I thought to land was my mother country, where long ago those teenagers had waved me goodbye and, in retrospect, whose letters to me while I was in Germany were a valuable source of fuel.

After my long space flight, I returned to Japan with the strange sense of having made a full orbit around the planet. The new studio was a little warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo, in an area dotted with rice fields and small factories. When the wind blew, swirls of dust slipped in through the cracks, and water leaked down the walls in heavy rains. In my dilapidated warehouse, only one sheet of corrugated metal separated me from the summer heat and winter cold. Despite the funky environment, I was somehow able to keep in midnight contact with the cosmos—the beings I had drawn and painted in Germany began to mature. The emotional quality of the earlier work gave way to a new sense of composure. I worked at refining the former impulsiveness of the drawings and the monochromatic, almost reverent, backgrounds of the paintings. In my pursuit of fresh imagery, I switched from idle experimentation to a more workmanlike approach towards capturing what I saw beyond the canvas.

Children and animals—what simple motifs! Appearing on neat canvases or in ephemeral drawings, these figures are easy on the viewers’ eyes. Occasionally, they shake off my intentions and leap to the feet of their audience, never to return. Because my motifs are accessible, they are often only understood on a superficial level. Sometimes art that results from a long process of development receives only shallow general acceptance, and those who should be interpreting it fail to do so, either through a lack of knowledge or insufficient powers of expression. Take, for example, the music of a specific era. People who lived during this era will naturally appreciate the music that was then popular. Few of these listeners, however, will know, let alone value, the music produced by minor labels, by introspective musicians working under the radar, because it’s music that’s made in answer to an individual’s desire, not the desires of the times. In this way, people who say that “Nara loves rock,” or “Nara loves punk” should see my album collection. Of four thousand records there are probably fewer than fifty punk albums. I do have a lot of 60s and 70s rock and roll, but most of my music is from little labels that never saw commercial success—traditional roots music by black musicians and white musicians, and contemplative folk. The spirit of any era gives birth to trends and fashions as well as their opposite: countless introspective individual worlds. A simultaneous embrace of both has cultivated my sensibility and way of thinking. My artwork is merely the tip of the iceberg that is my self. But if you analyzed the DNA from this tip, you would probably discover a new way of looking at my art. My viewers become a true audience when they take what I’ve made and make it their own. That’s the moment the works gain their freedom, even from their maker.

After contemplative folk singers taught me about deep empathy, the punk rockers schooled me in explosive expression.

I was born on this star, and I’m still breathing. Since childhood, I’ve been a jumble of things learned and experienced and memories that can’t be forgotten. Their involuntary locomotion is my inspiration. I don’t express in words the contents of my work. I’ll only tell you my history. The countless stories living inside my work would become mere fabrications the moment I put them into words. Instead, I use my pencil to turn them into pictures. Standing before the dark abyss, here’s hoping my spaceship launches safely tonight….