A painting carved thousands of leaves, pierced a million needles, and he used 10 years of painstaking efforts to pass on ancient Chinese magic.
Leaf painting, also known as leaf carving, originated in the Zhou Dynasty and flourished in the Tang and Song dynasties, using the natural form of leaves and drawing on the natural veins of leaves. The works are as thin as cicada wings, the color is natural, and the decay is magical, but because it is not easy to collect, many fine products are lost, and this technique is once on the verge of being lost. In August last year, a group of "leaf sculpture" works of "Qingming on the River Map" became popular on the Internet, which was disseminated by many media such as People's Daily, China Daily, Central Broadcasting Network, Yangtze Evening News, etc. The ancient and moving leaf painting techniques entered people's sight through a post-90s work.
Ding Li of Xianyang, Hubei Province, likes to paint since the age of 5, drawing, watercolor, oil painting have tried, and wood carving, bamboo carving, stone carving, nuclear carving, etc. are also involved because of love.
At the age of 13, he saw an old man carved on a leaf with a small blade at an art exhibition, and he stood by and watched, thinking it was magic, and watched it for nearly two hours. The old man asked him, would you like to learn? Xiao Ding Li nodded happily and became the old man's closed disciple. Later, Ding Li learned that this old man was the third generation of the "Leaf Carving Master".
At the age of 15, he met Teacher Wu Guanzhong, who taught him that young people can not follow the old path, but must inherit first and then innovate, and constantly break through. He kept these words in mind, even if the road was bumpy and difficult.
Collecting leaves is a difficult process, requiring you to go deep into the mountains and look for linden trees, plane trees, and magnolia trees. The leaves must also have a growth cycle of more than five months, yellow but not brittle, and have not been bitten by insects. Blades with a ratio of 5:5 on both sides are preferred. The selected leaves must also go through more than 60 steps such as pruning, soaking, hammering, carving, grinding and so on, and then not be damaged before they can be used as leaf painting materials.
He deliberately studied ancient French tattoos. After practicing on animal skins and paper, he applied it to the leaves. I didn't expect that the color of the thorn dye was a mess, and later after years of painstaking research and experimentation, he used batik technology to fix the color of the leaf brush wax, and successfully solved the problem of leaf smudge and antiseptic, which was a major breakthrough in aesthetic concepts, ancient techniques, and leaf embalming. Ding Li said that such manufacturing steps are very cumbersome, but the leaf paintings produced have a texture of double-sided embroidery, and if you don't look closely, some people will think that they are oil paintings or embroidery works.
Traditional leaf carving emphasizes more craftsmanship, and complete leaf carving needs to be completed by using process steps such as embroidery, painting, rendering, micro-engraving, paper cutting, and calligraphy. Ding Li pays more attention to the richness and artistry of the picture, and on this basis, he uses a variety of artistic expressions such as brushwork, watercolor, ink painting, oil painting, etc., using silver needles as pens and mineral pigments as ink, and carving leaf veins and leaf flesh through new techniques such as rendering, branding, stabbing, yin carving, and yang carving.
Because of his long-term creation, his hands have left a series of knife marks. When reproducing Zhang Zeduan's masterpiece "Qingming On the River" of the Northern Song Dynasty, dozens of boxes of eye drops were used because of the long-term inflammation of the eyes caused by excessive use of the eyes. It took more than a year, millions of needles were pierced, thousands of leaves were carved, and finally a set of leaf paintings carved from ten white magnolia leaves, "Qingming on the River", was presented to people.
Many people who came to admire him were willing to pay a lot of money to buy his leaf painting "Qingming On the River Map", but Ding Li refused. He said that if I did not meet someone who particularly cherished it and had the ability to collect it well, I would rather give this set of works to the Palace Museum.
During the epidemic period, he created "Feixian Chang'e", which was selected as a government gift and given to the Yunnan Aid-E medical team.
In one of his creations, "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains", the cost of the ore pigments that have been used has cost a small 200,000 yuan.
For more than ten years, he has studied leaf carving production techniques such as leaf vein thorn painting, leaf vein rendering painting, leaf vein ink dyeing painting, leaf vein branding painting, leaf vein grinding color painting, etc., and has become a school of its own with unique techniques. In order to make leaf paintings known to more people, Ding Li has held leaf painting publicity exhibitions many times and entered primary schools and universities to promote teaching.
The Chinese magic that has been passed down for thousands of years should not be overwhelmed by time and silenced. Ding Li has used his energy, effort and artistic creation for more than ten years to do this conscientiously.
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Producer - Wang Bo Editor-in-Chief - Liu Aiping
Chief Executive Officer │ Wang Mudao Chief Reporter - Leshui
Edited by Fang Hua, Cao Xinyu, Wang Yizhu
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