A wonderful, rainy day . . .

On Friday our professor at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts hired a bus and took us to several of his favorite villages. It was a wonderful, rainy day and the bus ride was the wildest to date. We saw many men in hats like the one in my last post.

This sketch shows a fisherman waring one of them in the village of KeQiao, The City of Bridges. There were many little boats like this one in the canals in Shaoxing. As we walked along the canal, we passed many fascinating doorways. Some had older people sitting in them. Most had open doors revealing people going about their daily chores inside. A man in a Dutch-style doorway saw my pin, smiled and said, "Artist!" as he tipped his head toward my pin. These were given to us when we arrived at the academy. We all wore them.

Then there was a woman washing food in the canal – a reddish-brown chicken strutting alnog the path – I wanted to sit on the groud and paint them both!