Rural scenery

For years, they discuss with instructors from the Xiuzhou district cultural venue about their work in the village on Wednesdays. They exchange ideas about composition and coloring and their experience of painting. This has become routine for the elderly women and their instructors. To create a piece of work, they must first make a sample on A4 paper, tell the instructor about the ideas, and then perfect it according to the instructor's advice. After that, they need to scale up, enrich the details, and color it until the creation is complete, according to the "Ten Sisters".

"Incredible" is the word most uttered by 67-year-old Dong. "For various reasons, I wasn't able to go to school, and I don't even know how to write my own name, but now I'm called a 'painter', and I'm just very happy about that."

She recalls the first time she got down to painting: "My hands were shaking badly and when the instructor asked me to paint a fish, I was so nervous that I painted four legs on it!"

After their training, the paintings are no longer "childish", one of the instructor's says.

"This painting seems to be flat, but if you look closely, you can see that it actually shows a three-dimensional scene," pointing at a painting entitled Fairy Embroidery, the instructor says. "None of them have received professional training, it is not easy to have such an imagination." That aside, the group has worked hard.