Story by Suzanne Bourret
THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR - Saturday, June 3,2000

Lilly Tjeng, 9, started taking art lessons in May 1998. Two years later to the day, she celebrated her second anniversary of art study with a wonderful gift. She won the Elementary Teacher Federation of Ontario's art contest for her watercolour of a doll.

Tjeng is a Grade 4 student at Sir Isaac Brock school in east Hamilton. Her art now hangs in her teachers' homes and she has donated some of her work for school fundraisers. She is an expressive and outgoing student who is grateful for her talent.

"I feel it is a gift and a blessing from God," she said.

PHOTO BY - JOHN RENNISON

Lilly Tjeng with some of her many paintings.

Lilly Tjeng won recognition for her watercolour painting of a doll
just two years after she started taking art lesson.

Her late father, a pediatrician, was also an artist who did oils, watercolours and Chinese paintings. Tjeng started painting when she was seven, two years after her father died.

"When I was younger, I did a lot of pictures with markers but I did my first watercolour, a mountain and a colourful sunset, taken from a photograph."

The painting looks far advanced for a child of her age.
Her mother framed her first painting after she started taking art lessons and hung it in the kitchen.

"I looked at it every day and it encouraged me to continue," she says.

Tjeng started art lessons at her church and now has weekly, two-to three-hour lessons at her home. She says she likes watercolour because it is a gentle and soothing art form.
When she paints she feels productive.

"I am amazed by myself and I say to myself,
'Did I really do that?' and then I feel happy with myself."

Her portfolio includes paintings of a lighthouse, a harvest, a church on a hill, a liily, a doll and a bear having a picnic, and a work titled Red Barn on Twenty. Her two favourites are the doll, "because I am still a kid," and the liily, "because it is adult and the opposite (of the doll). "I had never painted a flower before and when I was painting it, it felt like someone else was doing the work but my hand was doing it."

She came up with the idea of selling her work so that she could afford framing her pictures
and paying for her art lessons.