Ding Yanyong's artistic journey began in the West and eventually returned to tradition, and the title of "Matisse of the East, the Modern Bada Shanren" is the best summary of his artistic career. Ding Yanyong uses his strong personality and unique life experience to integrate the deeply different national cultures of the East and the West, so that the common artistic spirit of the two can be reflected, creating a new style for Chinese oil painting.
Ding Gong's works on the subject of the human body in the 1970s were only 5, which are very rare, and this work is one of them. The painting depicts a pair of lovers sitting in the arms, in which the man wraps his hands around the woman on the right, and the face is eye-catching and one-eyed, looking forward, conveying a personalized scene narrative to the viewer, and creating a romantic atmosphere of Chagall's lover scene in the picture.
Different from Chagall's soft and poetic picture tone, Ding Yanyong boldly uses the free brushwork of Fauvism, so that the figure breaks through the shackles of actual form and spatial scale, and conveys the original vitality hidden in the body of the character with free and unbridled lines and warm and bright colors, and the statue-like concise shape carries the emotional weight of Matisse and Picasso's paintings.
Oil painting is an important part of Ding Yanyong's artistic creation, in his thirty years in Hong Kong, oil painting creation has never stopped, from the 60s to the early 70s Ding Yanyong's artistic creation entered a mature period, during which Ding's painting was diligent, this piece created in 1969 "Orange Lady" is one of the most classic representative works.
"Matisse belongs to Matisse, and Ding Yanyong belongs to Ding Yanyong." Ding's lines come from the training of calligraphy and gold stones, and understand their connotations. In his 20s, Ding set a clear and unambiguous artistic ideal and an object of inquiry, that is, combining the spontaneous brushwork of the Brutalist Matisse, the freehand tradition represented by the Bada Shan people, and the ancient seal symbolizing the original aesthetic concept.
For Ding Yanyong, innovation is not to blindly adopt Western formal methods, but must first be based on the cultural foundation of traditional nationalities, that is, the freehand tradition of "intention to write first". To this end, he transformed the simplicity of the Bada Shanren and Xu Wei's arrogance into the characters of Xiang Yu and Yu Ji in "Chu Bawang" through the management of color tension, showing the charm of "pictograms of things, standing up for words, and writing concisely and not simply". This vast vision of the intersection of East and West not only continues the "simple" and "primitive" artistic ideals pursued by the artist before 1949, but also reflects his focus on the expression of the subjective spirit of Fauvism and the further development of the treatment of free space in the process of focusing on ink creation after the 1950s, and by continuously deepening the understanding of literati painting, leading the creation of oil painting with the traditional freehand spirit, so as to exert the rich vitality of oil paint colors into the picture effect of ink painting. In this way, the single line and flat shape of the early character creation were changed, and with the childlike humor and innocence, it showed the ridicule and speculation of human nature itself.
Merging the past and casting the present should be infinite: the game of painting and calligraphy
Mr. Ding often said that paintings must have three "natures", one is personality, the other is the nature of the times, and the third is nationality. Paintings of the times can be in harmony with the times, highlighting the spirit of the times in which the painter is located, and then Fang Fei is not the rest of the ancients. Paintings with national nature can ensure that the national painting style does not fall, otherwise they will take their fur from foreign countries and foreign countries, and how can they be out of the circle of people, and force the appearance of Western painting in Chinese painting, so that they can please the novelty for a while, but eventually they will be ridiculed by those who know it.