Nanshan Xueji (Chinese painting) Liang Ming
Ice and Snow Spirit (Chinese painting) Wang Juming
Flying Eagle of the Snow Mountain (Chinese painting) He Jialin
Ink Dance Ice and Snow Pen Song Winter Olympics (Partial Chinese Painting) Yang Lifu, Yu Xiaolong, Wu Xiquan, Sheng Shouyong, Shi Zhengjun, Liu Wenxiao, Wu Lei, Jiang Enli, Zhang Weihong, Wu Longchun
The holding of the Beijing Winter Olympics has set off a heat of ice and snow. The creation of ice and snow landscape paintings also focuses on the Winter Olympics, with the help of unique artistic expressions, depicting a pure fairyland on earth, showing the comfort and beauty, joy and passion that people experience in the ice and snow world, arousing people's awe and love for nature, and becoming an important carrier for recording the times, inheriting culture and sustenance.
Pen and ink affectionately send the Winter Olympics
The Olympic movement and the arts have a long history. The influence and promotion of the Olympics on fine art can be traced back to the early days of the Olympic Games. Under the influence of the ancient Olympics, ancient Greek art formed an idealized aesthetic character. This influence and impetus is now also reflected in the creation of ice and snow landscapes.
In Beijing, the "City of the Two Olympics", "Tiandiren - Exhibition of Fine Art and Calligraphy Works of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics of the National Academy of Painting of China" helps to set off the cultural and artistic atmosphere of the Beijing Winter Olympics with 200 new works by artists of the Academy. Among them, a number of excellent landscape paintings have strengthened the connotation and expression of "point scene figures" in Chinese landscape painting, which is quite eye-catching. For example, in Liang Ming's "Nanshan Xueji" and Wang Juming's "Ice and Snow Spirit" and other works, skiers fly down from the top of the snowy mountain with a graceful posture, dance with the ice and snow, and look forward to the landscape; not only depict the magnificence of the snowy mountains, but also highlight the vitality of ice and snow sports, with a deeper vision, a broader mind, and a more confident attitude, highlighting the Chinese aesthetic interest and disseminating contemporary Chinese values.
In Heilongjiang Province, where ice and snow culture and ice and snow sports are "double and radiant", the 100-meter ice and snow calligraphy and painting volume of "Ink Dance Ice and Snow Pen Song Winter Olympics" jointly created by a number of painters shows the grand momentum and upward spirit of the Winter Olympics, and presents the charming style of ice and snow culture in the north. The long scroll is divided into four theme sections: calligraphy with ice and snow as the content, ice and snow landscape painting reflecting the scenery of Longjiang, ice and snow figure painting describing ice and snow sports projects, and signatures of world champions, with the Olympic spirit and Chinese sportsmanship as the mainstay, supplemented by ice and snow culture, highlighting the combination of tradition and modernity, sports and art, and composing a Winter Olympic hymn.
The magnificence of the ice and snow world highlights the charm of ice and snow sports, the healthy rhythm of ice and snow sports also adds vitality to the ice and snow, the Olympic spirit and Chinese aesthetics complement each other, and the ice and snow landscape blooms the charm of the times.
Open the door to the scenery of the Northland
From ancient times to the present, winter romance is always indispensable to ice and snow. "Suddenly like a spring breeze in the night, thousands of trees and pear blossoms." The wonderful scenery of everything wrapped in silver after the snow is intoxicating. The crystal clear and moist qualities of ice and snow are also used as metaphors to praise the pure and noble qualities of human beings. The humanistic connotation of ice and snow has continuously inspired generations of artists to express the illusion of ice and snow with their brushes.
Looking back at the history of Chinese art, Gu Kaizhi of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Wang Wei of the Tang Dynasty, Li Cheng and Fan Kuan of the Song Dynasty, Huang Gongwang and Wang Meng of the Yuan Dynasty all created the snow landscape and water structure. The ancients used the "blank space method" and "bullet snow method", borrowing the ground for snow and holding objects for snow, and setting off the snow by dyeing the sky and the earth. In layman's terms, they paint the environment, the atmosphere, the cultural implications, the spiritual appeal, not the ice and snow itself. This traditional artistic technique is widely used in the creation of Chinese paintings with the theme of the Winter Olympics. For example, He Jialin's work "Snow Mountain Flying Eagle", white clouds linger, snow mountains are majestic, the track is winding, focusing on the atmosphere and vastness of the northern snow landscape. The clouds in the mountains break through to set off the height of the snow-capped mountains, and a cable car is dotted in the distance to show the width of the snow-capped mountains. Whether it is the outline of cedars, the cloth of clouds, or the shaping of mountains, the works are "dyed in the hollows of the stone, and white in the high flats of the stone surface... The branches of the forest are left white on the back as the meaning of hanging snow." Leave the blank space for snow. This blank artistic technique is subtle and ingenious, full of long-term and timeless meaning. Some people say that snow is a blank space in winter. This kind of snow landscape created by using the blank space method is undoubtedly quite oriental landscape artistic conception.
The traditional blank space method is suitable for depicting the snow scene south of the Great Wall, but it is not enough to fully express the white expanse of the northern country and the magnificent snow scenery and ice and snow wonders outside the plug. The scenery of the northern country, which is frozen for thousands of miles, cannot be truly reproduced on rice paper, which cannot but be regretted. Since the 1960s, I was born in a snow country and immersed in ice and snow landscapes, and I am determined to establish a legend for the mountains and rivers of the northern country. Silver-clad forest sea snowfields, beautiful ice tree hangings, inaccessible polar glaciers... I continued to pursue the land of the motherland, facing the white ice and snow on the white rice paper, repeatedly groping and experimenting, and finally using alum water into the ink, I found a breakthrough point in the technique. Because alum has the effect of tommetting color, every stroke of the falling paper will leave a water mark on the rice paper and will not disappear, which can show the transparency of ice and snow. This technique breaks through the "blank space method" of ancient snow painting, making ice and snow become the main body depicted in the work, adding new elements to Chinese painting with a different style of art than the traditional art.
From the beginning of a group of people in small counties such as Linkou and Bei'an on the border of Heilongjiang to learn ice and snow painting, to today's creators have spread all over the place, and now the ice and snow landscape has formed a large-scale creative group, and the enthusiasm for creation is high. Many works use techniques such as the splashing method, the snow wrinkle method, the dripping white method, the overlapping method, and the ranking method to push the "white" in the ice and snow landscape to the extreme. For example, Yu Zhenfang's work "Scramble upstream" uses new techniques of ice and snow landscapes to show the scene of athletes chasing after me in the snow field.
"Silver World Three Buckets of Ink". The mixed artistic techniques of ancient and modern times focus on the sports boom ignited by the Winter Olympics and open up a new realm of ice and snow landscape painting.
Maintain the cultural characteristics of Chinese painting
Ice and snow landscape painting pursues "cold and easy beauty". This kind of cold beauty excludes complicated colors, reflects the simple and self-disciplined, ethereal and sparse artistic realm, and creates a peaceful and tranquil, idyllic and warm, fascinating ice and snow world.
Cold is an important part of cold zone culture and the core of ice and snow culture. Yiqi is a kind of rhyme produced between pen and ink and rice paper. The escape of the north, implemented on the picture, is the ethereal spirit of contemplating all things, the silence of thousands of miles of ice, and the thinness of the whole body. Lin Rongsheng's Chinese painting "Leap" is full of this cold beauty. The towering snow-capped mountains, only slightly rubbed at the turn, are left blank in large areas, and the leaping figures of skiers are dotted among them, blooming with vitality and reflecting the vast expanse of the snow field. Above the screen, paint the blue sky and leave white clouds. The tones of blue and white contain the quality of ice and snow, and the picture is clear and striking.
These new works of ice and snow landscapes born from the Winter Olympics let us see the infinite possibilities for the development of Chinese painting. As a national art, Chinese painting should fully display its own characteristics on the world cultural stage. The successful holding of the "Light of Life 2022 Ninth China Beijing International Art Biennale" and the "2022 Olympic Art Congress", as well as the previous "China Ice and Snow Painting Exhibition" in many countries, have shown the diverse artistic landscape of Chinese art, which has received wide attention and praise. As the inheritors of national art, Chinese painting creators should adhere to the stance of Chinese culture, adhere to creative transformation and innovative development, highlight China's aesthetic interests, and clearly establish Chinese style and Chinese style in the world art world.
Ice and snow give birth to a new artistic charm. Chinese paintings that sing songs for the times and lyrically write for the people are full of vitality. Thousands of weathers have been spread on the picture of the new era.
(The author is honorary president of Heilongjiang Provincial Academy of Calligraphy and Painting)
Layout design: Zhao Kairu
People's Daily ( 2022.02.27 08 edition)