A few months ago, we were nicely surprised to find Mum and George on Tammy’s Instagram post.
We started to follow Tammy’s latest project. Her subjects conjured up a lot of memories for Mum.
These are local scenes from where Tammy came from.
But what Mum hadn’t known is that painting was Tammy’s first love before she discovered dance.
And she does dogs too!
And then there’s Snoopy!
It looks like we may have another Lockdown Achievement story here!
May’s comment: Tammy and I met through this blog. As she read our blogs, she had realised that Bruno and Darcy frequented The Pet Spa and they had their vacation at the House of Mutt.
We eventually met and even though we both hailed from the same part of the world, she from Singapore and I from Malaysia, we lived completely different lives. Tammy was trained as a dancer, taught dance and started a non-profit dance company, while I was leaping from one corporate job to another.
Tammy has always fascinated me. She never did anything that was the expected and half-hearted. When Lockdown came about, I watched her launch into another form of art. I was intrigued as to how far she would go. And this is her story.
I am a “hyphenated” artist. I am a trained dance artist and a published author. My 1st art love however is actually painting. As a child, my original dream was to move to Paris to paint. That dream was abandoned the moment I discovered dance. With a month’s worth of quarantine to get through, I could not think of a better time to revisit paint. I thought I would also do something useful, like start working on Christmas cards while in quarantine painting.
The second painting I made was a turning point in my encounter of paint. I was confronted by the model’s sheer masularity, and power. Suddenly, I was no longer just depicting what I saw in a superficial manner. Paint became for the first time, like an alphabet – each colour, each brush stroke could be pieced together to express an emotion or spell out a story.
As I have been choreographing dance and writing for so long, this encountering of paint felt like a returning to my truest, creating self. And to be able to be my authentic self, brings me a lot of joy. So I just kept painting and painting afterwards 🙂
I felt/still feel a hunger to explore, to play, to experiment and to express with paint.
As with dance/writing then, now, I practise almost daily.
It’s heartwarming to watch someone follow their dream.
I admire Tammy’s tenacity and her ability to express herself in different art forms. You can continue to watch Tammy explore the world of paint on her Instagram account – @tammylwong
She is open to taking commissions.
