Iron Painting Craft: "Ice Beauty" in Iron Pieces

Source: People's Daily - Hebei Channel Original draft

People's Daily Shijiazhuang, December 12, iron, in people's hearts has always been hard, extensive, but there is an art, but can turn the hard iron into a soft finger, in another posture in front of people, it is the iron painting process.

Liu Limin, 57 years old this year, is the inheritor of municipal intangible iron paintings in Fengnan District, Tangshan City, Hebei Province, and has been watching his elders make iron paintings since he was a child, and he has studied iron painting making technology after graduating from junior high school at the age of 16. "When I first started working in an iron painting factory, there were hundreds of employees, the business was very popular, and I often received orders from abroad. Foreign friends also call iron painting 'ice beauty', which is deeply loved by overseas friends. By the mid-1980s, for many reasons, the factory had closed down and Liu Limin had been laid off. She had planned to change her career and find another way out, but when she saw those iron paintings she loved, she still couldn't give up in her heart, and she gritted her teeth and persevered, and this persistence was 41 years.

It is understood that the iron painting process draws on the layout of Chinese ink painting, integrating folk paper-cutting, woodcut sculpture, gold and silver jewelry forging and other technologies in one furnace, flowers, figures, landscapes, grass worms and so on can be included in the painting. The production of iron painting is more cumbersome, the need to use pliers, tweezers, hammers, soldering iron, scissors and other more than a dozen tools, to go through the finalization, tart, cutting, calcination, welding molding, baking paint and many other processes, each is very important, interlocking, are related to the artistic value of iron painting, testing the craftsmanship of the producer. Liu Limin said: "The most delicate process of the iron painting process is welding, its welding is different from general welding, it is with sterling silver plus a little copper powder, a little bit of welding, can not have half a sloppy." ”

In order to improve her skills, in addition to her own exploration, Liu Limin also visited many older generation of iron painting makers, as well as iron production in other regions, such as Wuhu iron painting and Malanyu iron painting, etc. She studied and practiced hard, and integrated the essence of the absorption into her own iron painting works. I don't know how much effort it took, how many iron pieces were wasted, how many hands I practiced, and finally raised my craft to a more refined degree than the older generation, and the iron paintings created were more exquisite and more dynamic. Liu Limin said: "The most difficult thing about iron painting is character painting, and the most difficult thing about character painting is the face of the character. The looks and manners of the characters are all depicted in the eyebrows, and the lines of the facial features are the most slender, and the loss of a millimeter is a thousand miles. ”

At present, Liu Limin's iron paintings involve hundreds of landscapes, figures, animals and other themes. Among them, Liu Limin also combined craftsmanship with the development of the times according to the elements of his hometown, integrated shadow puppetry, commentary and other themes into iron paintings, and created works such as "Flowers as Media" and "Pretty Sunset", "Integrating the humanistic and scenic elements of his hometown into iron painting works, and using iron art as a form of expression to show the historical culture and customs of my hometown is the goal I have been pursuing." Now, the Winter Olympics are approaching, and Liu Limin has begun to plan to integrate the elements of the Winter Olympics into the iron painting process and bless the Winter Olympics in his own way. (Interpretation of the Scriptures)