Yellow River (oil painting, part) Wang Keju
Maple leaf red (oil painting) Song Huimin
Noon (oil painting) Zhou Sicong
Rising Sun (oil painting) Zhan Jianjun
Untitled (oil painting) Zhu Dequn
Sparrow (oil painting) Wu Guanzhong
Painting is the process of constructing a visual space on top of a plane and creating a multi-level aesthetic feeling through a rich formal language. The square space on the plane is the "field" for the artist to exert his creativity, which can transmit ideas and emotions, thus triggering the rich imagination of the viewer.
In the creation of oil painting, a wide variety of styles and techniques have their own characteristics and functions, but most of them revolve around the core of "space". When the painting plane is visually separated from the limitation of "plane", it can build a bridge between reality and imagination, showing a unique charm. The perspective method that has gradually matured since the European Renaissance is the most familiar method for painters to depict visual three-dimensionality and depth, and the popularity of this method has made the effect of oil painting expressing real scenes reach the extreme. In fact, the way to create a sense of space is not limited to perspective. The treatment of different elements in painting, such as block contours and brush stroke directions, can all hint at the existence of space, and color is an important factor in it.
The wide color range and long drying time of oil paints provide painters with a wide space and sufficient time to find colors that match their hearts. At the same time, oil painting is different from Chinese painting, watercolor painting and other paintings that use lines and blending as the expression language. The dependence on color makes oil painting more focused on the pure expression of color, which can not only show subtle color scale progression, but also carry extremely delicate emotional changes. If oil painting is a crown, then color is the brightest pearl in this crown.
Colors can be described by hue, saturation, and brightness, and they are called the "three elements of color". Color itself is spatially expressive. Simply put, applying paints of different colors to the same plane will look like you are moving forward or backward. The essence of colorful color is the response of the visual nerve in the human brain to different wavelengths and amplitudes of light waves, and the nuances of wavelengths and amplitudes of light waves will change the viewer's perception of color, resulting in huge differences in psychological feelings.
The contrast between cold and warm hues often triggers the viewer's perception of space the most. Warm long-wave colors such as red and orange, compared to cold short-wave colors such as blue and purple, it is more difficult to focus accurately on the retina, the outline of the color is relatively blurry, it looks like there is a "sense of expansion", the sense of space is in front, and the boundary of the cool color block looks clearer, there is a "sense of contraction", and the sense of space is behind. Looking at Zhu Dequn's work "Untitled", although it does not depict any specific objects, the flowing brushstrokes and cheerful colors are intertwined to create a space with a sense of depth. Obviously, warm red and yellow have a more space for "forward feeling", and cool colors such as blue have a "sense of backward". Through the magic brush, the artist places the colors of different hues in different positions on the same plane, creating a space with deep layers, contrasts and mysteries.
The spatial sense of color is not only related to the coolness and warmth of the hue, but also closely related to saturation. Taking Wu Guanzhong's work "Sparrow" as an example, the painter depicts small scenes of mountain villages with flexible brushstrokes, and the painting uses yellows of different saturation to express the distance and proximity of the space. Although the yellow brightness of the yellow land in the distant view is high, the saturation is low, the yellow leaves on the branches of the trees in the close view are more saturated, and the wildflowers at the front of the picture use bright and bright high-saturation yellow. The painter uses superb skills to vividly show the hierarchical relationship of space by relying on the increasing saturation of color in the same hue picture with yellow as the main tone.
Luminosity is also an element that affects the sense of color space. Bright colors have a visual "sense of expansion" and "forward feeling" due to the phenomenon of "light infiltration". Dull colors have a "sense of contraction" and a "sense of retreat". The lightness is white, so the white chalk words on the blackboard tend to look more eye-catching and closer to the viewer than other colors.
In an oil painting work, the hue, saturation, brightness, area, outline clarity and other elements of a color block jointly determine its "visibility". The "visibility" of color, also known as "perceptuality", is the feeling of strength and weakness of color. The law of color affects the relationship between the guest and the owner and the level of the picture, but in the real creative practice, it is precisely because of the personalized understanding and use of color by different painters that the variety of artistic faces has been created. Therefore, the relationship between picture color and space is not static, and cannot be simply understood as the foreground is a warm color with high saturation and high brightness, and the distant view is a cold color with low saturation and low brightness. The space is two-way, the foreground can also flow backwards, and the vista can also jump forward, which often allows the work to produce rich variation and charm.
In Song Huimin's work "Maple Leaves Are Red", the forest depicting the distant view uses bright reds with high saturation, high brightness and warmth, and the visual tendency to move forward is strong. In contrast, the foreground woods use low-saturation, low-light, and cool dull colors that visually tend to shrink and move backwards. This results in the visual feeling of the reverse flow of the foreground of the picture backwards and the perspective forward, which not only cleverly focuses the viewer's gaze on the theme of the picture, but also strengthens the rhythm of the scene, adding layered richness and readability to the work. Zhou Sicong's work "High Noon" depicts two female figures who are working, and the large gray tones make the characters full of a sense of flat decoration. Cleverly, the painter outlines the figures with bright colors, creating a soft backlit atmosphere and sense of space. Three-dimensional and flat, realistic and freehand coexist harmoniously in the works, and the afterglow is long.
In addition, there are a large number of clever uses of color in traditional Chinese art forms, providing a rich source of inspiration for local oil painters. For example, a prominent feature of the Northern Wei dynasty murals in the Mogao Grottoes of Dunhuang is that they often use warm earth red as a background, and depict the main body of the foreground with cold stone green, and the stone green blocks are set on the picture like gems, warm and unrestrained. This seems to be inconsistent with the law of "near warm and far cold" in color space, but the "sense of expansion" in space shown by the red background makes the spiritual connotation of the picture more full, and while weakening the sense of spatial depth, it establishes multiple spaces on the same plane, and incorporates the stories of different time and space in one painting. This use of color and the juxtaposition of multiple spaces provide a reference for contemporary oil painters.
Color is an important visual element, with strong lyricism, is a language that can intuitively express the artist's heart. The expression of space is one of the principles of color organization, but in creation, there is no need to limit the use of color to the limitations of "rules". In the end, the organization of color depends on the inner needs of each artist, and the charm of art lies in unlimited creativity and unpredictable expression.
(Author: Liu Yue, Associate Professor, Oil Painting Department, Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts)
Source: Guangming Daily