Stylised Doves in Blooming Garden Card

In this colourful painting, doves flutter their wings surrounded by stylised flowers and trees. This painting by my mother is in the "Tu-Aunqua" style, a descriptive name for the meticulous process of drawing the design on tissue paper, transferring the pattern onto silk and then painting with oils. The stylised flowers and animals and method was something my mother learned from her mother. The tu-aunqua term, which was found on a 1971 exhibit brochure, might have come from a rough phonetic translation of "labour table painting" from Chinese.