Author: Chen Ding
Quiet, an easy name to remember. Nowadays, more and more people in the art world associate the name "quiet" with the identity of "realistic oil painting artist". Along with this status, there are honorary professors of the Ukrainian National Academy of Fine Arts, members of the Chinese Oil Painting Society, and directors of the Sino-Russian Oil Painting Association.
Quiet and gentle, humble and low-key, at the recently opened "Bloom - Quiet Oil Painting Exhibition", quietly walked into the audience and introduced these painstaking works of the past 20 years to the viewers one by one. She is like a kind and kind teacher, evaluating every "student" she loves. In fact, Quiet was indeed a middle school teacher, and her students were indeed in those paintings.
Quiet (second from left) at the scene of his work exhibition Chen Ding/Photo
"Growing Up" Chen Ding/Photo
"Dealing with the Summer - New Lotus" Courtesy of the interviewee
A female painter who records the "youthful years"
Quiet, who graduated from a normal college, unexpectedly entered the school as an art teacher. Although she shouldered heavy teaching tasks and family responsibilities, she never gave up the "painter's dream" that she had been thinking about since she was a child. She teaches and draws at the same time, and her gentle and easy-going personality allows her to get closer to her students, who like her and are willing to share with her the big and small things she has grown up with. As an oil painting creator, a chance has brought her artistic creation closely into line with her life as a teacher.
It was during a proctoring exam in the sprint of the third grade, and quietly noticed a sweet-looking female student. The girl has big "talking" eyes, but these eyes are covered with blood. The girl's coffee cup was in her hand, and the table was piled with thick books. A pair of beautiful big eyes, with buds waiting to be released, but it gives people a feeling of being overwhelmed, quietly looking in the eyes, the heart is deeply touched. It was also at that moment that Quiet decided to pick up the paintbrush and draw the children around her, showing the lives and thoughts of the teenagers she was most familiar with, and recording the joys and sorrows of their growth. The quiet "Youthful Youth" series of works was also born.
Quiet said that in the works of art, works that reflect the lives of adolescent boys and girls are very rare. At this age, they are in the middle school stage, they live most of the time in a relatively closed school, and it is difficult for the average artist to have the opportunity to enter the campus to understand their lives, but she has unique conditions. She faces these children every day, understands their learning, life, emotions in school, knows their thoughts, moods and sorrows, she focuses on this specific group, through the performance of their unique looks and bags, MP3s, flying thousand paper cranes, etc., presenting the adolescent memories of the post-90s generation, and giving the viewer unlimited reverie space.
Quiet said that these works of hers show a kind of refraction of her youthful ideals, an artistic bloom of her creation of a spiritual paradise, and a special expression of her way to attract more people's attention to teenagers. "If you want to portray them, you have to come into their lives. They are my students and my friends. They are willing to tell me anything to be careful, such as receiving a small note from a boy, the pressure of studying is very heavy, and they have an awkward relationship with their classmates. I like to use my paintbrush to depict the energetic and positive side of children. Many people who have seen my paintings say, how nice it would be if these girls you painted were your own daughters! ”
In this way, Quiet found her own "self-reserved land" and concentrated on cultivating, she drew those green body contours, agile eyes and youth stories with one stroke. In the quiet view, youth symbolizes vitality, vitality, change, and an unlimited future. It is a feeling of hope and the charm of the beauty of youth.
The painting of silence is seven or eight years. In October 2010, Quiet held the "Ru Ge Nian Hua - Quiet Realistic Oil Painting Solo Exhibition" in Beijing's 798 Art District, which was also her first solo exhibition in her life. The exhibition has attracted much attention from the art world and has also produced great social repercussions. Quiet laughed and said: "Since then in the art circle, she has become 'the female painter of the student in the painting'. ”
Only the "body" is in this painting
Quiet believes that realistic oil painting can convey the content and thoughts and emotions that the painter himself wants to express to the viewer most truthfully and directly through a real sense of existence, and for the viewer, there will be no sense of distance and it is easier to accept. "I am fascinated by the realism of realistic oil painting and its polishing of details. Especially for the portrayal of the demeanor of the characters, I think that only realistic oil painting can convey the inner world, spiritual outlook, and complex psychological feelings of the characters that the painter wants to depict to the viewer truthfully and directly through subtle eyes and rich body language. I believe that a work that can move people must have depth and thickness, and can touch the depths of people's souls. ”
Later, Quiet left the campus and became a full-time painter, devoting himself to the artistic creation of realistic oil paintings. So far, Quiet has created a large number of realistic oil paintings, and the subject matter has also gone out of the campus. However, it is not difficult to find that her works are still mainly depicting young women.
For this creative preference, Quiet explained that female painters who paint women are actually painting themselves. Compared with male painters, female painters are more emotionally expressed from the inside out when creating female images, and this kind of creation carries the memories and feelings of their own lives, which is a kind of heartfelt telling. "Maybe the image of the painting is not me, but their heart is me, and their experience is also my own growth experience." When I was fifteen or sixteen years old, there would also be that kind of adolescent excitement, and there was also the pressure of studying. I have lived in the countryside for more than ten years, and I know what rural girls like, and I will communicate with them often. They take the soles of their shoes, they rub the hemp rope, they peel the lotus seeds, these are the lives I have experienced. I painted them to form a series of nostalgic folk customs, just to show the simplicity of rural girls and their beautiful yearning for their future life. As a woman, I can also feel women more from the inside and perform women well. ”
Another important reason for quietly obsessing with the creation of female figures is that she believes that female figures are "really beautiful". Quiet was obsessed with aesthetic things from childhood, and later chose aesthetic images to create oil paintings. Quiet believes that the female image is nature's gift to the world, and female beauty cannot be replaced. The female image is soft and delicate, and at the same time has the powerful power of procreation, making women weak but tough and fraternal, which makes the female image rich in connotation and very impressive.
With a specific image, Quiet extends the tentacles of art to thousands of years of Chinese historical civilization, and through the image of young women, she shows all kinds of folk labor scenes and shows the seasonal changes of the twenty-four solar terms. The Chinese cultural symbols in the work are perfectly combined with the characteristic figures in the picture, so that the viewer can feel the change of seasons and the strong local traditional charm. "For example, my painting "Dealing with the Summer - New Lotus" depicts a scene of a girl picking lotus seeds. At that time, my hometown was by the river, and we often went to pick lotus seeds, and after picking them, we would break them open and eat them. Most of the content I depict in my paintings is closely integrated with agricultural activities, and I hope that through the bright and beautiful images of these young women, the characteristics of different solar terms will be displayed, so as to deepen people's understanding and concern about the culture of the twenty-four solar terms, and protect the Chinese cultural heritage through art. ”
Let "freedom" lead aesthetic education
As a painter and educator, Quiet has his own understanding of aesthetic education. She firmly believes that aesthetic education will have a profound impact on a person's aesthetics and taste throughout his life. "In life, whether it is the selection of daily necessities or daily wear, it is also at a certain age, some people will feel that he is still very elegant, but some people seem to have given up the aesthetic, this so-called abandonment, is not deliberate, but he does not know how to choose." This is the taste problem, the aesthetic problem. Quiet, for example.
Quiet believes that a person's ability to perceive art and beauty needs to be guided and inspired in childhood, and children need to be exposed to beautiful things more, so as to form direct feelings, and eventually form aesthetic habits and tastes. Quiet does not approve of children attending various out-of-school artistic skills tutoring classes at a very young age, children should not be taught how to draw is right, they need encouragement and freedom of creation. "Don't tell your child what color the apples are and what the sun is, don't limit them too early and give a lot of rules. Let them play freely, praise more, encourage more, how to draw is good, all right. There is no uniform standard for art itself, and children's confidence in art is the most important. I also suggest that more art courses can be set up in the school, so that children can do more, observe nature more, and see more art galleries and art galleries. The children's horizons have broadened, and the aesthetic level has also gone up. (Chen Ding)
Source: China Youth Daily