modern Chinese painting:the red pistil orienting to the sun

Chinese Painting:The Camellia and the White-Eye Birds

 

A Kingfisher Resting in the Lotus Pond

 

I have in my blood an uneasy need for change, which is the constant evolution of perpetual search for progress in my métier. The thought of finding some new secret of this difficult craft has always haunted me. I have to modify the expressive technique, when setting out the new esthetic ideas, it comes to the means by which they convey the dreams through art. This means that I should pursue a wider knowledge of the resources of my art, that I remain forever an apprentice.

 

Years of obstinate plodding along the same path of painting dotted with difficulties and successes, with anxious self-questioning and uncertainty, I am still able to carry my purpose which is impelled by a desire of escaping from the confines of tradition and the finality of a kind of visual form. The presence of whatever model in a work is just passing reference; it enables me to be assured that my invention is not moving improbably far from the truth.

 

I find that when I abandoned the habitual expressive way, I were not only richer in experience, I were ready to be myself. Therefore each version of the lotus pond would reveal an essentially different ramification of my spirit and feelings.

 

In this painting, I draw a kingfisher perching on the stem of the seed cup. This brightly colored bird is so beautiful that in China in the Qing dynasty, many headdress ornaments wore by the empresses and imperial concubines were covered with kingfisher feathers. My concern of the bird is to retain its glistening textures with the technique of small strokes, with which I endeavored to create voluminous form.

 

I also developed the forms of the seed cup, the leaves, flower in my composition sculpturally and they also take the subtle lights well; here the picturesque could serve to firm up the whole and impose coherence.

 

This is the last painting, the tenth version of the serial of ‘Lotus Pond’. I would apply myself to carrying on the next stage of my development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Slice of Glittering Night Scene of the Lotus Pond

 

Out of doors, there is a greater variety of light than the interiors, where to all intents and purposes it is constant. But for just reason, light plays too great a part in the broad daylight, and all the entities are subject to the luminary whose shafts of sunlight illuminates all things and produces a kind of momentary effects according to different hours. The individualities of objects are indeterminate. When Nature is under cover of night, the vague visual images of the existences tempt us to figure out what they are and what forms they are in. Regarding a painting of night motif, an artist has to exercise his penetrating vision to give the obscure nature a marvelous sense of the contents, and also a sense of the form of the soul.

 

It is proper for an artist not to want to stand still, finding a new language to express his new approach to art, but if it fail to have reference to the reality of nature, it is about to perish of dryness and vacuum. For nature is an inexhaustible reservoir of energy, images, emotions, rhythms and light, that everyone can draw the strength of his expression from the earth itself, and such strong relationship built up could vivify every brush-stroke. There is something more about painting the night scene of nature; it is like closing the eyes to the outside world, and let the feelings of nature’s inward musicality and bewitching mystery being the leaven that provoke and accelerate the germination and blossoming of a slice of a silent night.

 

The visions of night solicit my imagination. Each detail in the painting is carefully described and loving positioned, that flowingly reveals each intrinsic element, detached from and yet inseparable from the whole work. The scene being shrouded in night mist, the appearance of objects will keep fading, but my persistent attempt is to pin down their outward appearance, shimmering in the dim moon light. The contours of the distant lotus leaves are delineated with soft light tone to make it visible in the dark environment, while the front leaves are immerged in the misty night.

 

The external reality was transposed into tonal rhythms, charming in subtlety and gracefulness. In this work, with a subtle difference given by a tone that I was looking for and which I have found at last. The background must be suffusion of air and light; they have to be vague because they must not distract us; especially the two roses in the upper right corner, I treat them with undertone, and give a sensation of soft freshness and porousness, whereas the plastic intensity is given to the lotus flower with the much more resonant and high-pitched quality of hue. The butterflies and bird retaining their opacity and their solidity dispute the field with the transmutation into the land of spirit by turning them into phantasms. The persistence of the link with the inspiration of the earth allows me to venture much further beyond external reality.

 

 

The Variegated Carps Having a Good Swim in the Lotus Pond

A good honest work should attract and reflect the most secret and revealing rays of Nature. In a certain sense, Nature is only a projection of our own emotions, our own feelings. Therefore even the most impassive painter puts a little of himself into what he is doing; even a clumsy brush-stoke can reveal the inner artistic dream. But only the artist with the height of his ambition could transcribe his sensation into a work which could certainly offers the most exemplary fidelity to Nature’s spiritual requirements.

 

The sensibilities of the beauties of nature are sometimes as fleeting as the very sensation of woodland coolness itself, or the burst of warmth of a stubble field, or the whiff of a seashore, while the tenacious artist could capture them, served by an infallible sureness of hand, to translate the inspiration into art, in which all the fragments are more fertile and valiant than what we can see of the visible world.

 

Seduced by the graceful, vivacious movements and the curvilinear shape of the variegated carps, I paint them with hardly concern than to do a naturist piece. As is, the images being treated in the most realistic manner is a bit banal, nevertheless, I want to make a chase painting out of it which would render the link to the liveliness of nature and the artistic freedom to the elemental and spontaneous by rejecting the sole copy and description.

 

While in a trance so integrated in the total phenomenon of Nature, I must make an effort to obtain enough mental tension to maintain the necessary distance for creative act. For the submerged fish, the vision of their movement in the water would be the main configuration.  However the perceptual response to Nature is one thing, which is an inward inspiration, but to photograph it visibly is another. After the long and deep pondering, I resolve to depict the eyes of the fish with full spirit although that is imperceptible while object is in the motion beneath water.

 

Once the cord to string the harmonies of Nature is found, I attach to it completely, and I make it the theme of my painting. Waving their delicate fins and proceeding gracefully in a certain undulating movement, the fish are relegated to the background. For the fish are just the vivid fragments of the whole orchestration of the composed naturalness.

The Glimmering Scenery with Two Chicks in It

I always want to force myself to do something other than what I know how to do. I think it’s a transformation which hasn’t borne fruit but which will. In my works, I like to use singularly skillful and subtle procedure, to seek renewal from the direct impression of Nature as much as from a kind of poetic thoughts. 

Led harmoniously, form and colors in themselves produce poetry. Therefore everyone could feel the sensation in front of a painting that brings us to a poetic state, depending on the painter’s intellectual forces, which emanate from it.  A real master translates not only forms and colors from Nature, but also the ineffable charms repose in it. So there is some truth in Plato’s words: “How do you think he would answer if he were told that until then he has seen only ghosts, that now, before his eyes, are objects more real and closer to the truth? Would he not think that what he saw before was more real than what he is being shown?”By demonstrating the unexplored aspects of Nature, a masterpiece extends the viewers’ visions. 

Whenever I start to paint, I am sunk in the intimate and incessant contemplation of Nature, where I find everything poetic, and which is more than sufficient to start the creative impulse. The undulate margins of the lotus leaves flowing gently in the lovely cool breeze; having the curvilinear shapes, the leaves look like the springing up waves with a splash. What is more, the veins of the lotus leaf at the right moving in an upward direction is stimulating and suggestive of a kind of dynamogenic qualities, evoking moods of liveliness and effervescence which would be experience by the viewers. There is always something more elaborate artistic concerns in an idealized type of subject which is not only an orchestra, but also a diapason. 

A painting, though it is a logical construction and vigorous design, keeps something of the generalized aesthetic feeling which records the pleasure of the artist. Whenever I work, I draw with my hand, my heart with an eye toward the big confronter of my feelings: a structural completeness to embrace the forms, the atmospheric colors, the value of lines, as to render the rich, exuberant, and even florid of Nature.

The composition of this painting has been carefully contrived as to unite the relationship between surface pattern and spatial recession, an interest which I communicate with the sensibility of my own delight. I have been satisfied to make little isolated records of the delight in the details of the lotus flower and the fluff of the chicks. Especially the lotus flower is the most prominent part that I arrange the light to let it receives the highest luminosity which makes it illuminates the immediate surroundings. The flower also being treated as the gilt boss of a bas-relief is echoed with the mellow sonance of diverse glimmering tones of the chick and the leaf. The superfluous sinuosities of Nature turn into the simplified statement by a process of gradual elimination. Therefore the painting is devoid of profound distances of three dimensional spaces, though of course, by means of atmospheric color, the gradational hues of greenery, the eye may interpret these recessions as distance. 

Behind the sensual delight, that Nature herself present to our senses, is the tenet of musical principle, by which all the constituent elements are welded together so well in their union to perform the lyrical harmony and rhythms. I often manage to conceal poetry and intelligence in my works through such secondary feeling of music which strikes the deep chord in us.

A Moonlit Landscape

Having the abilities as an artist may not be a bliss, but a cursed gift.  An artist will probably live in real penury if the paintings could not match public taste well enough to mean sales.  What is more, if the artist has struck out in a stylistic way of painting which is the outcome of untiring endeavor and a tenacious desire to improve.  The repeated torment and depressing self-doubt and despondency are the real hardship. 

The qualities I value most highly in my work are individuality and originality.  I don’t want my work to lose all its freshness, therefore every work is a new departure as to explore a new expressive region and to chart the most significant technical changes from one phase of exploration to the next. 

I often get lost in my working process, and always question myself the effectiveness of my own approach of treatment.  Therefore I am frequently depressed and insecure about my art.  The painting illustrated here is an example for which I don’t know how to compose the phenomenal world with an overall visual rhythm and central thought, that I set it aside unfinished for several months.  One day, I chanced to take it out and found that it still looked charming that I really want to make the completeness of it. 

With an aim to compose a painting as lyrical as the melody of a piece of serenade, I have drawn out the poetry in a found subject.  The night, murky as it is, is nearly ripe for the conception of the day; therefore the myna and butterfly appear in the mountain scene as the harbingers of dawn which will soon break over the valley.  By choosing a downward line of sight from a high eye level, we are able to look over the tops of the mountains and see a great expanse of distant horizon beyond, and the landscape is lit by the moon on the left. 

In the painting, Nature tinctures a poetic mood and atmospherics of the moment.  The tenuity of light and its effects hang over this slice of landscape, with the smoke haze overcasting the foreground that the relationship between the viewer and the foreground is unclear, nevertheless, all the specifics in this area are rendered meticulously.  The vivid and nuanced colors of flowers and butterfly seem to be floating on the upmost surface and lure our attention to linger on them.  However the lively myna is so energetic that it captures us and leads our views further in the jumps in space from the foliage to the outcrop of cliffs and, beyond, to the dim loom of ranges and moonlit sky.

I varied my brushmarks in different areas of the painting, I do the foliage as a massed agglomerate of dabs, while the surface of the cliffs is painted in a series of criss-cross strokes which build up to a dense surface effect, and the sky is painted in a loose manner.  Compositionally, the nuancing shades of color and the modulations suggest depth without impairing the unity of impact.  In the main, the linear and physical, plastic qualities would abet the marriage of spatiality and surface structure. 

Every nuance, each visual vocabulary is orchestrated to the last detail that the completeness of a work of art often involved a struggle in it notwithstanding the seemingly effortless.