When I was a child, there was an old man living in front of the alley next door to my house. Every New Year's Day, he always opened the wooden door of his low hut, and in the cold, he saw the sky light that came in, and colored the paper fixtures for the Spring Festival.
The old man's surname was Tan, and he was once a reader. We call him "Tambo." Tan Bo usually sets up a stall on the street to make a small profit to make a living. In his spare time, he painted some flowers and insects and fish, and sold them to others for decoration. Before the New Year, the paper tie masters took the semi-finished products and asked him to "dress" and complete the final drawing process.
One snowy day, I tiptoed to pick ice strips from his low eaves and taste the ice. I grabbed at his waist door and watched him draw intently, only to see a bamboo cage in front of his crotch, his nose was about to fall, and the red brush was pointing out some beautiful flowers on the paper paste lantern.
Tan Bo knew that I had come to see him paint, and his head did not turn back and said triumphantly: "You know? Red plum is my best product! Go to the Temple of the Heavenly Kings! There are a lot of beautiful plum blossoms there! ”
The Heavenly King Temple in Phoenix Is halfway up the mountain in the south of the city, and the Scenic Mountain is the remnant of the foothills of Nanhua Mountain. The entire foothills are covered with tall trees, red maples, spruces, masson pines, chestnut trees, camphor trees... The literati yashi said that the "South China Diecui" in the "Eight Great Views" of the Ancient City of Phoenix refers to this. Standing at the Temple of the Heavenly King overlooking Phoenix, it is really a sweeping view! An ancient city embraced by green mountains!
According to Tan Bo's suggestion, I invited my friends to go to the Temple of the Heavenly King, because the time was so long, I could not remember the scene at all. I remember a winter in the 1990s, when the snow fell for a day and a night, and the ground was white. The small city of Phoenix is like a child in a white hat, lying in a white swaddle in the foothills of the South China Mountains. The Tuojiang River, which runs through the city, is like a black ribbon tied to this scenery. I hadn't seen such snow in several years, so I was so excited that I stepped out of the first line of footprints in the snow, stepped on the creaking snow, and went to the Temple of the Heavenly King in the morning to look for plums.
As I approached, I saw the temple's red walls and old, black ledges. There are dozens of plum blossoms in the temple, and the branches of the trees are full of overlapping and overlapping. What should have been very wanton, but was overwhelmed by the heavy snow, they struggled from time to time, and with a loud roar, they shook the large pile of snow on the path. The small red flowers that appeared in the snow flashed in the morning sun. The dark incense of plums suddenly burst out of the snow's collapse and hit me in my heart, giving me a sense of alert that the snow was originally fragrant. The plum fragrance soaked in the snow, and after a long time, the snow naturally stained the dark incense. The dark incense cannot be seen or touched, but it is refreshing. The sound of a violin seemed to ripple around my ears, and in the silence, this snow plum just gave me hallucinations. I wonder how colors can be associated with music!
I overheard the sound of hesitation in the distance, or I don't want to step on this Qiongyao world! Another trail came up an elder, so early to go up the mountain, must be a wonderful person! The visitor was dressed in a gray coat and a red scarf, solemn and steady. He walked and stopped, and when he got closer, he could see the face under the hat, white and clear. "Principal Pei!" I eagerly said hello. As soon as he saw that it was me who had forgotten his friendship, he sighed: Mo Daojun is early, and there are even more early pedestrians! I saw him standing in front of the red plum quietly admiring the plum, bending over the plum bush and disappearing into the cold incense. I suddenly remembered a Song poem: Who transformed into a hundred billion, a tree plum blossom a bird. Which plum tree would he stop under?
Later, I became a painter, and in my old age, I also began to like to paint plums, in addition to going to the Tianwang Temple in my hometown, I also went to the Lingfeng Peak of Hangzhou's West Lake to admire plums and accept the influence of plums. The plum garden in Hangzhou has various varieties of plum blossoms on Shili Zhangtai Road. One day, after the snow, the first sunshine, along the way, the terrace of the water pavilion, tourists weaving. Someone sang Wu Nong's soft Yue opera behind the plum bush, white pigeons flew overhead with whistles in the clear sky, and more agitated violins played "Liang Zhu". I watched the snow plums, smelled the plum fragrance, and remembered Liang Zhu's sad and touching story. How can tragedy become a shocking aesthetic? How can this poignant love story turn into beautiful music? This is an enduring aesthetic topic! I have realized that snow fragrance, plum fragrance and music all have the characteristics of beauty, and they must have some kind of internal connection.
I thought, when can I turn the ink fragrance on the paper into an intoxicating plum fragrance? Unfortunately, "I report the road long and the sun is twilight", this topic is too big. Whenever, I can freely draw the plum blossoms in my heart like Tambo.
Early in the spring of a year, in the cold and snowy weather, I was making a red plum, and suddenly the poem was flourishing, and it was like a dream to order a small word, that is, the old dry and horizontal oblique and thin, ten thousand flowers after the red spring. Drunkenly sprinkle the plum man, but swing the bald. Fragrant, fragrant, stubborn stone lingyu know? In the snow incense, plum incense and ink incense, I was drunk.
