VietNamNet Bridge – Thirty-three women painters in the city are exhibiting more than 130 works that celebrate the beauty of the country at the city's Fine Arts Museum.


Different strokes: A visitor admires paintings celebrating the country's landscapes in an exhibition that lasts until the end of the week at HCM City's Museum of Fine Arts. (Photo: VNS)
Titled Que Huong (Homeland), the exhibit depicts landscapes and life in many parts of the country with a range of materials: acrylic, lacquer, oil on canvas, fabric collage and mixed media.


Most of the exhibitors, who are between 27 and 73 in age, are professional painters who graduated from the HCM City's Fine Arts College and are now working in various sectors of fine arts. Each of them is showing from three to five new paintings.


The exhibit features scenic landscapes characteristic of different regions of the country, including old gated villages and red-brick enclosures, valleys and rocks in cloudy Sa Pa, winter in northwest provinces and ethnic women in colourful brocade costumes on the way to the market in the north.


Scenes of the central region include images of narrow lanes between rows of low red-roofed houses, rose gardens or flower vibes climbing over hedges in the Highlands town of Da Lat, the shining sea near Nha Trang, a sunset at a central coastal village, and an ethnic Cham pottery village.


The south is featured with a cashew nut garden on southern Phu Quoc Island, a mangrove forest in Can Gio, a house-on-stilts, boats docked at desolate canals, life on rivers of the Mekong Delta, lotus ponds, night streets and small alleys packed with houses in HCM City.


"My acting life took me to different parts of the country, including the sea and the forest which I found really amazing," said veteran movie actress Tra Giang, who is also featuring her painting at the exhibition.


"The scenes are like prints in my mind and always visible in my subsconscious," she added, noting that three out four of her works were sold the first morning of the exhibition.


"The pictures here reflect the gentle minds of women artists via the use of colours and lay-out," she remarked.


Female artists tend to look at things from emotional perspectives, said Dang Thi Duong, manager of the HCM City's Women Artists Club, which organised the exhibition.


"They often feature human love," she added.


The exhibition lasts until the end of the week.


VietNamNet/Viet Nam News