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.