Xin Dongwang's oil painting "Breakfast" [Xinhua]

A tired and smiling Tom Brigham sits cross-legged, with his shirt partially unbuttoned and his eyes wide open, while a bespectacled Kevin Yang, a balding Chinese who stands nearby, wears American name brands and leans back with his hands folded emanating a confidence from the bottom of his heart.

The two, an American artist and a Chinese art critic, are the models in the new oil painting, entitled "A friend of Tom," by Xin Dongwang, a famous Chinese painter who is teaching at the Academy of Art & Design, Tsinghua University.

Xin told a news briefing on Tuesday afternoon in New York that the painting is the most valuable achievement he has accomplished during his first visit to the United States.

No blind copy of nature

"I try to paint an American on the U.S. soil to see how different in feelings from what I did in China," Xin told Xinhua, adding that "I try to illustrate what I saw from the perspective of Americans this time, rather than that of the Chinese people," which he and his fellow Chinese paintings are very familiar with.

"That's why I like the painting to be entitled 'A Friend of Tom, ' instead of 'A Friend of Yang,'" Xin said. "You can see the two men from two different countries, two different cultures, with different facial expressions."

In the painting, American quarters, dimes and nickels are scattered near the foot of a sofa, an image he thinks to show the depreciation of the U.S. dollar against the major currencies of the world, he said. "The setting is to show the casual lifestyle of Americans, and the disgruntled smiling of Tom is painted to show how Americans are feeling at a time of economic recession."

Xin rented a studio in the Big Apple and put up the background for painting. He is very particular about the settings. For example, he even changed the flowers three times just for an image of harmonious colors.

"A painter is painting the world out of his feelings, not just copy what he sees in a blind way," he said. "You should first study the models and understand the environment in which they are living."

It took Xin more than 20 days to finish the painting, during which he visited art museums of New York City and Boston in order to take in the essence of the U.S. art works, he said.

Being convinced to be a model

Tom told Xinhua that when he was approached by his friend to model in a painting, his first reaction was "No!"

However, Tom, who won his technical achievement award in the moving pictures in 1992, changed his mind after he read collections of Xin's works.

"His oil paintings show us the real world, and I came to like his works, so I decided to accept the offer," he said.

Being a model is no easy job, at all.

The painter spent two days on face, with nine hours each day, Tom said, adding that he was told to hold his hands still when it came to the part of painting his hands.

"It's really challenging when you are modeling for a painting," said Yang, who is president of the Chinese Contemporary Art Foundations in USA and the president of USWTV.com. "I keep the single posture for six to seven hours a day. It is really tiresome. "

Pay attention to people on the street

Born in 1963 into a poor farmer's family in Hepei Province in North China, Xin used to be a teacher in Oil Painting Department of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. His works were featured in the various national art exhibition and won the gold prize for his painting entitled "Breakfast," which features ordinary people eating a Chinese style of breakfast in the open air by the street corner.

Xin, whose brother and several of his family members still live in rural areas, started to pay attention to migrant workers in the mid-1990s. A migrant from the countryside himself, Xin tries to catch the changing fate of peasants in China.

The oil painting is an artistic form imported from Europe, but it has to be integrated into the Chinese culture, thus making the Western art full of vitality in the Oriental.

"The understanding of ordinary farmers is the treasure under my painting brush," he said. "Currently, I am trying to illustrate the fate of Chinese from grass roots, and I am also working very hard to get the Chinese oil paintings to be better understood in the Western countries."

(Xinhua News Agency August 19, 2009)