OUR HONOLULU
Zoo fence is painter's gallery
By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Staff Writer
One of these days, Waituck Lo should celebrate a 50th anniversary of his art at the zoo fence. The problem is, he can't remember how long it has been since he hung his first painting there.
When Madge Tennant was painting monumental Hawaiian tutus on canvas, Lo was painting monumental Chinese mountain scenes on wallboard under a bare bulb on the floor of his cottage in the Kukui slum district.
While John Young hung at the gallery at Gumps amid expensive antiques on Kalakaua Avenue, Lo hung down the street in the gallery of Barney Davis alongside tikis and Leeteg black velvets.
Maybe Lo has never had a show at the Honolulu Academy of Arts but, make no mistake, he has been faithful to his creative urge and has probably sold more paintings than most artists in Our Honolulu, not only in Honolulu but on the Neighbor Islands, in California and Colorado.
His craft is an ancient one. He paints with brushes made of deer and wolf hair. His watercolors don't come readymade in a box. He makes them himself Chinese-style. One type of Chinese watercolors comes in small pieces that he grinds into powder and dissolves in water.
The other kind of watercolor is made of rocks of different color that have been ground into powder. He buys it in small packages at Iida's and adds water with glue as a binder. The colors are vivid and vibrant.
Lo paints graceful bamboo, pandas, flowers, birds, mist-shrouded mountains and craggy cliffs, peacocks, and roosters ready to fight.
His career at the zoo fence is only part of his resumé. Art on the fence began about 1952, and Lo believes he hung his first painting there a year later after arriving from Shanghai where he grew up.
"I was born in Honolulu, but my family moved to China when I was 2 years old," he said. His father was a merchant who gave his son art supplies and paid for art classes. But Lo chose to take civil engineering in college because World War II bombs wrecked so many buildings in Shanghai that he felt that engineers would find work.
Instead, he returned to Hawai'i where he worked as an engineer and painted at night in his cottage on Hall Street, which isn't there anymore.
One day he saw a story in The Advertiser that invited artists to enter a competition at City Hall. He entered one small painting, a Chinese landscape. On the first day a doctor from Straub Clinic bought it for $50. Lo was making $150 a month as an engineer.
He sold in small galleries and for Barney Davis, started going to the zoo fence on weekends, then stopped because he was too busy, then came back when he retired. He's 83 now and blind in one eye.
A small painting takes him several hours to complete. "I think it before I paint it," he said. "But I don't know how the idea will come out. It's always different."
At the zoo fence, he usually sells two or three paintings a week.
