Yellow, blue, pink, black and white sheep are eating red grass. A girl flies with wings. A whole village is found in the stomach of a cow.

These imaginary scenes appear in the paintings of farmers from Makit County, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Living by the remote Taklimakan Desert, these farmer-artists have made their names known to the outside world through their most unique works.

Kumuksar Township, about 7 kilometers away from the town of Makit, is where the local farmers' signature paintings originated.

A bus ride from Makit to Kumuksar takes about half an hour. Visitors find themselves at Kumuksar when they see paintings on the sides of houses on both sides of the road.

Themes are all based upon the farmers' lives: picking cotton, shepherding, building houses, making nang (crusty pancakes made by the Uygur people), singing, dancing, the bazaar, haircutting and so on.

However, they are often quite abstract, with the virtual and the actual blended in the same work.

"Anything I see in the Uygur people's lives, I might try to draw," said Askar Imin, a 34-year-old farmer from Kumuksar.

In Askar's work, "Love for the Hand-drum" a man is playing a hand-drum by some withered trees at night. Behind him is a mosque, and beside the crescent of the mosque is the real crescent of the moon in the sky.

Askar said he got his inspiration for the work from a neighbour who often played the hand-drum at maxiraps, or folk parties, where Uygurs gather to sing and dance.

However, the scene of playing a hand-drum at night before a mosque was totally drawn from his imagination. After he finished his work, he found that the figure in the painting did not look like his neighbor.

The man is kneeling on the ground and holding a hand-drum in his hands, his head raised to face the sky, his eyes closed. Shrugging one of his shoulders, he seems to be dancing to his own beat.

In "New Roller" three groups of people are driving a donkey cart to transport wheat, weighing wheat, and grinding wheat with a new roller. On the upper right corner of the painting is a small patch of a wheat field.

The tableau may not have followed the principle of perspective, but like all the other Makit farmers' paintings, "New Roller" presents a kind of innocence and imagination that we usually can only see in children's paintings.

Not having received formal training in art, these farmer-painters follow their own instincts when drawing. This is probably the reason why these adult farmers still have a child's innocence and imagination.

Askar has a hectare of land to cultivate and a son to look after. He usually comes to the Cultural Station to paint in the afternoon, after finishing his farming.

"If I have time, I can finish a work in two or three days, but I'm often too busy," he said. "Sometimes I can only come once a week, and add a little to a work every time."

Now Askar has been working for a month on a new work entitled "Threshing Ground," although he still needs more time to finish it.

Usually Askar draws a draft with a pencil at first and then applies color. Like other farmer-artists in Makit, he uses a kind of condensed poster pigment to draw.

From this cheap poster pigment comes the strong and unexpected colors in the farmers' paintings of Makit. In their creative use of colors, objects are often bright. There are similarities between the farmers' work and modernist art.

The Cultural Station of Kumuksar provides local artists with a studio and materials such as pigments, paper, brushes and sketchpads. Their work is on sale in the showroom, with prices ranging from 100 to 1,000 yuan (US$12.3 to US$123).

Seventy per cent of the income goes to the artists, while 30 per cent is retained by the Cultural Station to buy materials.

Differing from Makit's traditional folk art like the Dolan Muqam music and Dolan dance, which have developed through centuries, the farmers only started painting in the 1970s.

In the 1960s and 1970s, popular art genres emerged in various areas in China, like workers' paintings, soldiers' paintings and fishermen's paintings. It was also at that time that the farmers' paintings of Makit came into being.

Now there are about 150 farmer-painters in Makit, over 40 of whom live in the Kumuksar Township.

Twenty-year-old Ayxamgul is one of the youngest painters in Kumuksar. A graduate of Xinjiang School of Industry and Commerce, she couldn't find a suitable job, but came back home after graduation. Then she devoted more time to painting, which she started at 18.

Like other farmer-painters, Ayxamgul learned to draw by herself. Though she participated in a training programme sponsored by the government of Makit in 2003, she found that the academic painting skills taught by experts from the Xinjiang Art Academy not very helpful.

"The academic teaching may regulate my skill of lining and coloring, but I still find my own way more natural," said she.

Many other farmers share the same feeling. For them, life is their best teacher.

(China Daily November 30, 2005)