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Hi,Dear Friends
How are you?
Time is passing so quickly that my 8th trip to Australia has lasted for 4 weeks.
Finally, the first 2 rainy weeks (since I arrived in Australia, it has been almost raining every day) passed. Sydney has entered its coldest time of winter. Every night, I paint in my down coat because the local temperature often ranges from 9°C to 14°C. However, outdoors, everything is still green and flowers can be seen everywhere.
Many times, when I walked on the street, I had an illusion that I was walking on the alameda between the campus of Missouri State University in the USA and my student apartment when I first landed in the US in September 2008. There were few or no people on the roads covered by thick trees, and the number of cars was much greater than that of people; the sky was so high, clear, and blue, with the songs of birds accompanying my steps. Then I often found some familiar plants and little flowers in my formal pictures that I painted in the US at my feet. The only thing that reminded me this is Sydney, Australia instead of Springfield, MO, USA is that there are no squirrels here as I often saw on the university’s campus and along the road; but there are many confident birds walking around here or even on a supermarket floor or an open-air dining table eating with people...
The good news is that an organization in Sydney will work with me and my work partner to start a cross-cultural and comprehensive art workshop on July 3, 2025.
So, taking advantage of the God-given interval before that time, besides matching the work of my partners, I am spending most of my time improving both my oral English and artistic creation.
Until last Friday, I had completed the eighth draft of the bird part of my Chinese Provincial Bird Map, which is one part of my World Cultural Map Series. Now, I am working on adding titles for each provincial bird in English and Chinese. Anyway, I am not satisfied with it yet; therefore, I will not attach it to my frame until I correct it and complete either the ninth or tenth draft.
During this process, I have bought and read many original Australian art books to study and compare their lines with mine because I have found that in Australia there are also many art books similar to Chinese line drawing paintings; they share some similarities as well as differences from ours.
My first impressions of them are:
1. The common aspect of both Australian and Chinese line drawing is that in some parts of the paintings, both add a lot of imaginations or fictional details to their line drawings.
2. In terms of plant expressions, Australian line drawing tends to add more detail and make it more complicated, while Chinese line drawing usually reduces some details and aims for simplicity or strives to be as close to nature as possible.
3. The biggest difference is that Chinese line drawing emphasizes the style of Chinese calligraphy; each stroke should be drawn as if writing in calligraphy, whereas Australian line drawings do not emphasize this aspect.
These interesting findings excite me, and I plan to study more about this topic and incorporate it into my future teaching jobs. Perhaps I can also write a paper on it.
During my time buying the books, I also paid attention to the prices of colours in Australia and in the US. A box of 12-color watercolour paints costs 7 Australian dollars and 7 US dollars respectively. A box of 24-color watercolour paints costs 10 Australian dollars, but I am not sure how much it costs in the US. Do you know how much it is in the US?
Although most students in my first Cross-cultural and Comprehensive Art Workshop in Australia will be Chinese-Australians, since English is the official language of Australia and my goal is to bring the Cross-cultural and Comprehensive Art that I created in the US to Australia, after I finished the first lecture at an institution and basically settled down in Sydney, since May 27, I have been following a teacher using an American original textbook to repeat the course content without referring to either the original text or subtitles. Each day, I worked on it for 3 hours.
Until now, I have retold for 13 days, totalling 40 hours. An interesting thing happened when my English retelling practice reached its 30th hour and then its 36th hour. I suddenly felt that speaking at a speed of 1x (normal speed) was too slow; therefore, I adjusted the teacher’s speaking speed from 1.0x to 1.25x and then increased it further to 1.5x—an increase of both speeds respectively by 25% and 50%.
Do you know? Since one day in January 2025, one of my English instructors, Mrs. Vicky, who has taught me since September 2015 at OTC in the US, said to me: “Shirley, your oral English should be improved” in the classroom of my second English instructor, Mrs. Fran Giglio of OTC during my 12th American trip. It has often reminded me to improve my oral English. To be honest, since I first landed in the US in 2008, 17 years have passed; however, my English level still does not meet a satisfactory standard. I do feel shy about it. So now I would really like to do my best to improve myself every day.
How about you? Do you have anything special to share?
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Sincerely, I am just a lifelong learner in the arts of painting, music, English, management and Chinese art teaching, and work on the website in my free time. I would really like to do something with what I have learned and make this website a little electronic bridge for cross-cultural and integrated/comprehensive art and Chinese language studying. This way, I can help others while improving myself.
Thank you always for your understanding, guidance and assistance and if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to write to info@ebridge.cn .
Shirley Yiping Zhang
June 9, 2025 (Australian Sydney Time)
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