My name is Rory Perrott and I am currently living in Yinzhou, Ningbo.
I grew up in a small coastal town in Ireland called Cobh, pronounced ‘Cove’. It’s a picturesque coastal town in the county of Cork on the south coast of Ireland. The town has a strong maritime tradition, a rich historical heritage and I am very grateful to have come from such a place. It’s always nice to have somewhere pleasant to return to when I visit family and friends but unfortunately I only get to go back there about once a year. I choose the hottest months of the Ningbo summer for this return trip to Ireland, when the temperature in Ningbo is in the mid-30s. It’s a well-known fact that the melting temperature of the average Irish man is much lower than this!
I first arrived in Ningbo back in September 2009. I never expected that I would still be living here in 2013. However sometimes life offers unexpected opportunities and changes of fortune that can be professional or personal. The personal good fortune I received was bumping into Caro-line Boehrer on Portman Boulevard one sunny afternoon. Caroline is a German national who has been teaching at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo for several years. It was a strange coinci-dence that we had met for the first time in Ireland a couple of months before this chance en-counter. The short version of this story is that we have been living happily together in Yinzhou since 2011.
Like many foreigners here in Ningbo my first job here was as an English teacher. Teaching was for me, as it is for many foreigners, an easy transition to life in China. Most schools take care of their teachers and provide the support needed to allow a ‘soft landing’ when they first arrive in China. For me this time teaching was short-lived after which I pursued a professional career in the creative world. My background is in art as I studied painting and art education when I was at university. I decid-ed to set up a painting studio on the upper floor of our large apartment. It is from this studio that I produced paintings for the exhibitions I had last year. I had one exhibition in Shanghai and another one here in Ningbo at the Yinzhou University District Library. I was very pleased with the outcome of both exhibitions and received a lot of support and encouragement during this time.
The work I produce is not always of the same themes or motifs as I am interested in vari-ous subjects and styles during the course of a year. I do have some recurring themes however and am quite fond of painting landscapes and in particular seascapes. Perhaps its because of where I grew up that I have so many water surface paintings but I can say for sure that I have been painting water surfaces for 18 years and will probably continue to paint them for the rest of my life. I get a great sense of calm when producing them and it pleases me when people say when viewing them that they also experience the same emotion. Lately I have been producing some landscape paintings made after a recent hike up a nearby mountain. The terraced plots on the mountain sides are very colourful compositionally and can be adapted to the canvas in what I feel are interesting ways.
The reality of working full time as an artist is quite harsh financially and often I take on-board some other design or creative work to supplement my income. I have produced some graph-ic designs for local businesses in the last few years and very recently I have been working for a company designing furniture. It’s good for me that the work is creative but often it can use up all my creativity leaving very little of that specific creative energy for my painting. I do love to receive commissions to produce paintings from individuals or businesses. It’s always an interesting challenge to meet the needs and expectations of the client, it is extremely rewarding when you deliver something that creates a huge warm smile to form on their face.
All in all, I live a good life here in Ningbo and have gained many loyal and warm friend-ships in the local and international communities. It’s sort of a funny state of affairs that members of the foreign community mix so freely with each other here in Ningbo and are all connected by the simple fact that we are not Chinese. Sometimes we feel that we get stared at too closely when we are about town or that our personal space may be invaded sometimes. We accept that this usually only happens out of curiosity and that in our home countries we have perhaps a greater mix of nationalities and races than are present in China. So being what we ‘laowais’ call a ‘white monkey’ is really a small burden to bear….well as long as we don’t get paid peanuts.
放大
缩小
默认