In today's Sichuan painting world, Cao Hui is a maverick artist, he is doing cutting-edge exploration of ink art in the "marginal" area; he is very low-key in the art garden of various genres, but he continues to dig deep into art; he continuously makes us feel the charm of ink art, while the self rarely "speaks".
Cao Hui was born in Chengdu in 1952. He is a member of the China Artists Association, a national first-class artist, a director of the Sichuan Provincial Artists Association, a special member of the Character Painting Committee of the Chinese Painting Art Committee of the Sichuan Artists Association, a visiting professor of the China-ASEAN Art College of Chengdu University, and is good at figure painting and comic strip painting.
I seek the maximum expressiveness of color. I set a box for myself, without losing the charm of ink, to give full play to the role of color. The combination of colors is subconscious during the painting process. In a cool color, I will rub two warm colors. Next to the heavy stone color, I would lean on a heavy ink. In the intertwined clusters of cold and warm, I will light a few thick and light inks. Contrast, suppress the fire, and make it blend.
For Chinese paintings to be beautiful in color, they must use ink. Ink and water color, stone color are all integrated, ink in ink dominance is unshakable. No wonder there is a saying that the pen looks at the color, and the freehand looks at the ink.
——Cao Hui
Cao Hui's creation mainly focuses on ink figure painting, with themes ranging from old tea houses, Cao family compounds, traditional gentlemen and women, Republic of China figures to modern urban series, Cao Hui only paints things that touch him and move him, so his paintings also touch and move us, and even produce a dialogue with the painting.
His works make people feel Cao Hui's time-space transformation of the passing water and the passage of time, as well as his humanistic complex of feeling worried about the times. The description of history and reality shows a vivid picture of life, and life has become the inexhaustible source of his art along the way.
Cao Hui's spiritual pursuit of traditional pen and ink and the influence of light, shadow and color in Western painting make his works have both Oriental-style dashing affirmation and free writing, as well as Western-style rigorous and aesthetic precision modeling and rich and changeable colors. This kind of art form created by the trend of inner feelings, whether it is brushwork or freehand, consistently conveys the spiritual temperament of traditional Chinese literati and the profound connotation of traditional literati painting, while also carrying thinking about the future development of Chinese painting art.
His boneless ink series uses the boneless color method to draw vivid and interesting and vivid character images, and the lines that he was originally good at became the finishing touch to portray the details. The weakened lines are painted on the boneless color ink by the wetness, and are softly integrated into the picture, making the characters in his pen intriguing.
His characters are dressed in eclectic costumes. Through the costumes to modify the shape of the characters, through the boneless color method to give the traditional Chinese painting a new breath of life. In the hazy curves, the dashing temperament of the characters and the temperament that is detached from the worldly sensual desires are conveyed on the paper. Through the structure of the architectural courtyard, the light and shadow are accompanied, the breeze is harmonious.
The painter uses a hazy brush to express a beautiful old love song, and the subtle differences and complex and bizarre emotions between women are diffused into an intoxicating and gentle flow of time; romance and dreams, yearning and pursuit, loss and sadness are so elegant and bone-like, like Snow Ruolan.