Blossoming in retirement: New love, new skills

Former aeronautical engineer discovers he has a talent for botanical art and masters it on his own, Xu Lin reports.

Wu Qinchang, 75, a senior aeronautical engineer from Beijing, enriches his life in retirement by creating botanical art with hands that once assembled airplanes.

For the past seven years, he has frequented Beijing's botanical gardens and parks to draw still-life paintings of various flowers, such as the lotus. He has made more than 710 black and white botanical illustrations using modern gel pens.

In China, botanical illustration is a rare hobby. Originating in ancient Greece, it's a genre of art that depicts the intricate form of a plant, highlighting its particular features with scientific accuracy.

"Drawing botanical illustrations makes me feel good, both physically and mentally," Wu says. "I always take a stroll in a park as exercise before I start."

Wu retired from a State-owned aerospace enterprise in Beijing. In his 20s, he spent five years in a workshop learning how to assemble an airplane.

A self-taught artist, he spent years training himself to draw without an eraser. He never makes a draft with a pencil but uses a common gel pen to render the final image in his sketchbook.

"Observation comes first. The secret is to mark five small black spots on the paper to ensure the rough scope of the flower, and I can have the layout in my head," he says.

Last year he underwent eye surgery for a cataract that had been hampering his work. His sight deteriorated over time to the point that he could only see a blurred image. His mastery of drawing helped to overcome the problem, but eventually he turned to a doctor.

On the back of each illustration, he notes the flower's Chinese and Latin names, its features, when and where he drew it and his thoughts and feelings about it.

Thanks to mobile apps, he can quickly identify species with a simple snapshot. If an app fails to identify some rare species, he searches on Plant Photo Bank of China, a government-supported online website that collects images, filmstrips and digital photos of plants.

He has also made friends with some botanists, who can answer his specialized questions.

Wu enjoys collecting stamps and likes to send a postcard to himself as a travel souvenir whenever he visits a new place.

When he was 62, just two years after retirement, Wu drew a small sketch of Jiangxi province's Sanqing Mountains on a blank postcard, after failing to buy a postcard with a picture. That's when he began to cultivate his drawing talent. He's always interested in learning new things, he says.