Zhong Zhangfa: The difference between a painter, a painter, and a master

<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="1" > the difference between a painter, a painter, and a master</h1>

Text | Zhong Zhangfa

Many people say that the current Chinese painting world is "'painters' walking all over the streets, 'masters' flying in the sky." Five- or six-year-old children can draw a few children's drawings, and they are called "little painters"; young people who have studied painting for a year and a half call themselves "painters"; even the elderly who have retired from their jobs can paint a few strokes, and their identity is immediately transformed into "painters". Why are people so keen on the title "painter"? In addition to the love of painting and the purpose of cultivating self-cultivation with painting, it is more important to see that paintings can sell for money. Painting can both profit from it and appear elegant, so why not enjoy it?

Is it a good thing that the streets are full of "painters"? We should look at this phenomenon from both positive and negative aspects: on the one hand, this shows that we are in a peaceful and prosperous world, the number of people engaged in painting has increased, and the artistic career has also prospered; on the other hand, it also shows that the public's understanding of Chinese painting as a national art is still superficial, lack of reverence, especially the difficulty of creating Chinese painting art. The proliferation of painters, the mixture of fish and dragons, and the creation of non-distinction will seriously affect the development of Chinese painting.

From ancient times to the present, most people engaged in painting work are based on painting skills to support their families, and not many can become qualified painters, most of them can only be regarded as painters. From painter to painter, it takes a lifetime of hard work to achieve it after a long cultivation process; and from painter to master, it is even more difficult, and it is not an exaggeration to say that "it is difficult to produce one in hundreds of years". Someone has done a statistic that there are currently about 500,000 painters with various identities in China, and there are only a few hundred people who can be called real painters, only a few dozen famous artists, and even more rare masters.

In the painting profession, people engaged in painting can be divided into painters, painters and painting masters, etc., and these levels have different professional level requirements and evaluation standards. What kind of person can be called a painter? The Xinhua Dictionary's definition of the word "home" is "a person who has mastered a certain special knowledge or has rich practical experience and engaged in certain special activities", and the painter is interpreted as "a person who specializes in painting (such as pictures, patterns)". It seems that the "home" word of painter still has a certain weight. The definition of a painter is "in the old days, it refers to a painter who lacks artistry", while a master is "a person with high academic or technical attainments", usually referring to "a scholar, expert, artist, chess player, etc. who is deeply accomplished and prestigious". Wu Guanzhong once said: "Very few painters go to artists, most of them are painters, they can publish their works, for fame and fortune, busy with survival, they have not learned anymore." Fewer and fewer people are working as hard as everyone else. When Mr. Wu says "everyone", he may mean a real painter who is moving towards the path of the master.

The art of painting has never only focused on the skills and techniques of painting, but a broad and profound knowledge. To become a qualified painter, you need to have talent, understanding and talent, you need to experience the tempering of nature and society, you must also be diligent and studious, constantly practicing, and you must be able to adhere to artistic ideals and pursuits, and be unswerving.

To become a painter one must start with a painter

Learning from tradition and learning from nature is the path that painters must take, which is the key to laying a good foundation and becoming famous.

Chinese painting is an important part of national culture, in its long development process, after the continuous creation of generations of painters, from the art form, pen and ink composition to the subject matter content, artistic conception, has formed a relatively complete art system. The line drawing method of the characters, the method of painting the landscape, and the painting method of flowers and birds have all worked hard before them, and summarized the systematic creation experience and methods and methods. Beginners need to study the traditional creative formula and learn the drawing methods of predecessors and others before they can get started. And this process often takes ten years and eight years, and it is impossible to take shortcuts and take shortcuts in one fell swoop.

Learning from tradition can make us stand on the basis of our predecessors and see farther, have a better grasp of artistic creation, and be more mature. But not all traditional programs are suitable for today's performance needs and personalized creative pursuits, we need to think, to absorb, to identify, to discard. If the learner does not analyze and grasp the study of tradition, he will easily fall into the quagmire of tradition and never dare to take half a step. Throughout the ages, there have been a large number of painters who are confined to the barriers of the ancients, carrying the burden of traditional styles and completing their artistic lives in conformity. Similarly, learning from others, not thinking independently, can only become a shadow of others. Wu Changshuo, Qi Baishi and other masters have said things like "Those who learn from me are born, and those who are like me die" said. Therefore, if you are only imitating, copying, and not having your own unique creation, although you are busy all your life, it is difficult to produce works with your own face, should such a person be called a painter or a painter?

Learning from nature is the only way to create Chinese paintings. Nature is the cradle of art and artists, the world has no mountains and no beauty, no water and no show, Taishan's majesty, the danger of Huashan, the wonder of Huangshan, the show of Guilin... The great rivers and mountains of the motherland are full of messages of beauty. Going to nature and going to the real society is what the Chinese literary and art circles have been advocating from ancient times to the present, and it is also the fundamental way of literary and artistic creation.

Is artistic creation about bringing the beauty of nature to the work? Can I paint like A photograph? The answer, of course, is no. But today, this method of creation is quite popular among painters. Someone once introduced one of these methods: to take some photos in nature, combined with some image data, through the synthesis of a picture composition, and then use the projector to enlarge onto rice paper, start to produce, spend several months or more, after repeated tracing, rendering, a dense, fine, gorgeous work was born. This kind of natural appearance beauty on the picture, with photography than the function, and the natural scene than the beautiful production of the work, because it is in line with the aesthetics of the public, quite can get the praise of ordinary people, but also can get the favor of some collectors, even in the selection of some Chinese painting exhibitions, many judges will be willing to vote for it...

The exhibition is a weather vane, this kind of painting method, painting style can be recognized and awarded in the exhibition, which has attracted many painters to follow suit. Over time, the creative trend of depicting natural beauty has gradually become generally accepted by people, and the negative impact it produces is worthy of our reflection. Discarding the artistic qualities such as the unity of Chinese paintings and the unity of form and god, the creation of painting as a kind of plagiarism, the aesthetics of Chinese painting are brought into a shallow, popular or even vulgar situation, and the lofty value and meaning of art are dissolved.

If artistic creation stays in the level of what the predecessors painted, you painted, how others painted you, without personal artistic thoughts, and could not create works with a unique personal appearance, how can you be called a "painter"? Similarly, learning from nature, but painting like natural objects, without the integration of personal subjective spiritual thoughts, lack of grasp of the essence of artistic creation, this so-called creation can only be regarded as staying at the level of "craftsman", and there is still a great distance from the real sense of "home".

The painter's word "home" should have its true content

The history of the development of Chinese painting for thousands of years is a history of the unremitting struggle of many innovative painters, and a clear expression of the great creativity of the Chinese nation in national art. In every painter and master, we can see his unique creative side. The long history and deep tradition are advantages, but they also bring difficulties to the innovation of our descendants, whose paintings have reached a very high height, and it is not easy for us to add some new elements to it. But every era should have the creation of each era, and no great creation in history can replace the creation of our new era.

Looking at the famous painters in the history of art, we can find that although each person's creative process and family formation process are different, there is one thing that is the same, that is, they go their own way, with different artistic concepts, expression methods and ink language. Therefore, painters in our new era should also have personal artistic thoughts, and the perspective of looking at problems and thinking about problems should also be different from others, especially in thinking and breaking through difficult problems that have been ignored or solved by predecessors and others. There is a phenomenon in the current theoretical and creative circles that deserves great attention, that is, most theorists and painters generally discuss the problem of Chinese painting creation from the level of brush and ink techniques, while paying less attention to innovative issues such as humanistic connotation, spiritual realm, and academic value, or not deep enough. My point of view is that most of the current works lack academic value, and the fundamental reason is that the depth and height of thought are not enough, the content theme is empty, and the spiritual connotation is insufficient, and the problem of "heavy form and light connotation" must be solved first. On the basis of the great progress that has been made in formal research and practice, whether or not a painter can enhance the humanistic spirit and open up a new realm of art is one of the main criteria for testing whether a painter is qualified.

As mentioned earlier, if we do not learn from tradition and nature, we will easily become a rootless tree and a water without a source. To grow into a true painter, first of all, you need to have a certain cultural accomplishment, secondly, you need to have technology, and again you need to have understanding. The so-called cultural accomplishment is not to read a lot of books, to be able to memorize a large number of ancient poems, to write a little poetry, you can be labeled as cultured, the key is to be able to "write and transform", can use cultural connotations to artistic creation. For example, poetry cultivation is not only to be able to inscription poems on the screen, but to use the art form of Chinese painting and the language of brush and ink to create a poetic feeling, to achieve "poetry in painting, painting in poetry", so that the work is artistic and philosophical, bringing unlimited imagination space to the viewer. Therefore, reading is a good thing, but it must also be able to be applied to creation, otherwise, even if you read books for a lifetime, get a doctorate, become a professor, and be known as a chinese scholar, it is equally difficult to become a painter. The so-called technology is not to copy the pen and ink techniques of predecessors and others to paint, but to refine their own pen and ink language and creation methods from tradition and nature through years of practice and tempering, so as to serve their own artistic expression. The so-called understanding, which is the key to becoming a painter, is very involved, it is difficult to say clearly in a few words, and the next interview gives an example.

For example, in the creation of landscape paintings, the key is whether there is a mood or not. Why hasn't there been a big innovation and development of traditional landscape painting for thousands of years? The key lies in the fact that its artistic expression is relatively fixed, single, and tends to be modeled. Most of the ancients liked to express the worldly and reclusive thoughts in landscape paintings, and most of them were presented as the static mood of the peach blossom source of small bridges and flowing water and "feasible, hopeful, swimworthy, and habitable". This artistic expression has been imitated and copied for thousands of years, and has become a fixed pattern followed by most landscape painters. Can the taking-ism created by the artistic conception and the repetition of the spiritual connotation be called artistic creation? The reason why Xu Wei, Shi Tao, Bada Shanren, Li Keyan and others are called "masters" is largely because they have broken through their predecessors in the realm. Therefore, we cannot get out of the shackles of the ideas of our predecessors, we cannot break through the barriers of the artistic conception of our predecessors, and the innovative development of Chinese landscape painting is ultimately empty talk.

Specifically, landscape painters should read thousands of books, travel thousands of miles, go to nature, and go to life. When a painter walks into nature, he cannot walk like an ordinary tourist, but must feel nature with his heart and understand nature with emotion. Taking the painting of Huangshan Pine as an example, the beauty of Huangshan Pine can be felt by everyone, if the painter can only find the morphological beauty of Huangshan Pine and the beauty of depicting natural appearances, it can only be regarded as a low-level level of artistic creation; the painter's expression of Huangshan Pine also needs to grasp its essential characteristics, express its unique spiritual wind and bones and the profound philosophy contained.

Traditional Chinese aesthetics believe that the nature of the universe in which man lives, the blossoming of flowers is unintentional, and the flowing water is also ruthless, which seems to have nothing to do with people's hearts. However, as a painter, in the face of the colorful Huangshan Pine and the colorful nature, the depths of the heart are bound to evoke strong emotions, subjective emotions and objective objects can be blended, and the passion of creation bursts out. Painters can give humanity to all things in heaven and earth, and take natural objects as objects of human spiritual expression and emotional sustenance. Artistic creation is to conform to the structure of human nature and the soul, so that the sun, moon, stars, mountains and water, flowers, trees, birds and birds all carry the color of feelings and the imprint of thoughts. Therefore, nature is beautiful, but if its beauty is not integrated into subjective emotions and lacks humanistic spirit, it is painted realistically, and the work will lose its aesthetic value due to lack of emotion, let alone artistic value. It can be said that if a painter cannot enter the realm of touching the scenery, blending scenes, and the unity of heaven and man, it is difficult to become a qualified painter.

At the technical level, traditional techniques and the pen and ink of predecessors were created by the predecessors according to the content they wanted to express and the emotional needs they expressed. "Pen and ink should be contemporary", everyone faces the subject matter content, the emotional thoughts to be expressed are different, how can the stylized and patterned pen and ink techniques be "universally applicable"? If the freedom of the painter's mind is bound by stylized technology, it will inevitably lead to a dead end in the development of Chinese painting. To refine the personal pen and ink language, it is also necessary to understand, to explore the isomorphic relationship between natural things and the spiritual world in the reference of "the unity of heaven and man", to study the link between image and image, and to find a pen and ink language that can both portray "elephant" and "intention". The dialectical unity of "teaching nature" and "painting from the heart" is a sign of the maturity of a painter's technique.

Chinese painting is a systematic discipline. Without personal artistic thought, personal way of thinking, and personal creative method, it is difficult to create good works. Therefore, there are not many people who can really be called painters, strictly speaking.

The painter should demand himself from the height of a master

Every painter with a sense of mission has lofty artistic ideals and pursuits. Demanding oneself at the height of a master should be a criterion that a painter has always practiced in his artistic career. Wu Guanzhong said that "there are very few painters to artists", I agree. A painter wants to enter the level of an artist (master), in addition to having a more comprehensive quality than a painter, more importantly, he must not care about personal gains and losses, withstand the tempering of life, look at problems and solve problems based on the forefront of the development of Chinese painting, and be willing to fight for the development of Chinese painting as a national cultural treasure for life.

To rise from a painter to a master, we must first have the artistic ideal of unswerving dedication to art, the artistic idea of not blindly following the crowd, the perspective of looking at things differently from others, and the artistic concept of big thinking, big vision, big weather, and big pattern. Such a person should become a devout pilgrim and a lonely thinker at the peak of art, bear the loneliness of life with a lonely will, have the courage to walk alone on the road of artistic life, and pursue and feel all kinds of joys and pains in the spiritual world in this state of spiritual loneliness.

Throughout the history of art, most of the real literary artists did not have a noble social status before they died, and they all came out of suffering. Indeed, without the difficulties of the path of life, it is difficult to have a profound understanding of thoughts, nor will it be felt and developed; without experiencing the vicissitudes of life, the soul will not be able to reach liberation. Most of the masterpieces of poets, the melodies of musicians, and the epoch-making works of painters are mostly felt by the creators after experiencing loneliness and suffering. For example, after experiencing drastic changes in their lives and suffering from the hardships of the bottom life, the Bada Shan people were able to create a masterpiece with a few strokes but can show the spiritual connotation of deep agitation and have the charm of traveling through time and space. Shi Tao also experienced a similar fate before writing the epoch-making painting theory "Quotations of bitter melon monk paintings", and his "one stroke painting" theory was deafening and influential to this day. Bada Shanren, Shi Tao and others have reached an unprecedented height in their artistic achievements, and it is difficult to succeed them after that, and they are veritable masters and masters.

In modern times, there are also many landscape painters who are struggling to climb on the road of artistic innovation, on the basis of inheriting the traditional landscape painting model, they explore the gaps and historical problems that the tradition has not solved, try to face the difficulties, open up new faces, find another way, and devote their life to creating works of art that are different from the traditional form and have a unique personal appearance, and form an independent artistic thought system from practice to theory. But such artists are rare in the art world after all, and they are often not recognized by the outside world when they are alive, ignored and buried. "Although it is hard work, blowing out the wild sand begins to reach gold", I hope that in the new era, the unique artistic creation of artists can play a role in leading the development of art as soon as possible.

In an environment full of copper odor and vague value judgments, art has almost become a tool to make money, fame and fortune have corroded the hearts of some cultural people, and how many people are willing to truly distinguish the boundary between painters and painters? How many people are still concerned about the innovation and development of Chinese painting? However, we believe that the Chinese nation is a nation with strong creativity, and in any era and any environment, there will always be some people who work silently for the development of art. It is hoped that more and more painters will move from painters to painters, from painters to masters, so that the national treasure of Chinese painting will continue to stand in the forest of world art and shine forever.