Fan Kuan,"Journey to Xishan", silk, 206.3 cm X 103.3 cm, National Palace Museum, Taipei
In the world, it is considered that the most representative of Chinese art and oriental culture is Chinese landscape painting; the peak of Chinese landscape painting appeared in the Song Dynasty; song dynasty landscape painting can be "broken to the Song Dynasty" of fine works, including Fan Kuan's "Xishan Travel Map", Guo Xi's "Early Spring Map" and Li Tang's "Wan gu song wind map". Among them, Fan Kuan's "Journey to Xishan Mountain" is known as "the first divine product of Song Dynasty painting" and the "treasure of the town courtyard" of the National Palace Museum in Taipei.
Fan Kuan (c. 950 – c. 1032), whose real name was Zhongzheng (中正), also known as Zhongli (also known as Zhongli), was born at the end of the Fifth Dynasty, a famous painter of the Northern Song Dynasty, and a native of Jingzhaohuayuan (present-day Yao County, Shaanxi). Because of his generous and open-minded temperament, informality, and drinking and seeking, people called him "wide", so he called himself Fan Kuan. Sexually sparse, drunk and good at painting landscapes, he is one of the three famous artists of landscape painting in the Northern Song Dynasty.
After learning Li Cheng for the first time, he realized that "those who are not as good as teachers are created", so they live in seclusion in Zhongnan and Taihua, and get the majestic atmosphere of the northern landscape, which Mi Fu's "History of Painting" calls "obvious as Hengdai", and he has created a sense of scenery, written about the true bones of the mountains, and becomes a family of his own. Fan Kuan was another great figure in northern landscape painting after Li Cheng, and later generations often compared the two. In the Northern Song Dynasty, Wang Yi once painted the two on the same wall, saying that Li Cheng, "The ink is moist and the pen is fine, and the smoke is lightly moved, such as a thousand miles opposite, and the beauty is beautiful." "Commenting on Fan Kuan," such as the true peaks in front of him, the strength of the qi is strong and majestic, and the pen strength is old and strong. "In contrast", the traces of these two paintings are true and one martial. During the Northern Song Dynasty, Fan Kuan's influence was comparable to that of Li Cheng, and there were many scholars, and there was a saying that "the people of Guan Shaanxi are only exemplary and wide".
Its painting peaks are thick and dignified, imposing and majestic, which makes people feel majestic and dangerous. The pen is strong and powerful, with many raindrops, watercress, nails, the top of the mountain is good for dense forest, often placed large rocks at the water's edge, and the houses are dyed black. The Song "Xuanhe Pictorial Notation" contains 58 paintings by Fan Kuan, and the famous calligrapher and painter Mi Fu also recorded 30 authentic works in his "History of Painting". Representative works include "Snow Scene Cold Forest Map", "Xishan Travel Map", "Linliu Sitting Alone" and "Snow Mountain Xiao Temple Map".
The "Journey of The Creek and Mountain" is a huge vertical axis more than 6 feet high, standing on the top of a towering mountain, with bushes at the top of the mountain, forming a dense forest, resembling a fungus, and surrounded by mountains like a consort on both sides. There are buildings in the woods, and a group of donkeys between the hills and rocks are hurrying.
The most impressive thing is that the mountain is pressing down on the face, forcing people to see. As Xu Beihong said: "And a mountain, accounting for almost two-thirds of the total area, is abrupt and abrupt, making people stunned." "The top of the hill is overgrown with trees, full of tenacious vitality. The delicate ideas are even more solid and evocative to portray the mountain. A flying waterfall cascades down from the mountains, and there is a sense of "flying down three thousand feet, suspected to be the Milky Way falling for nine days". At the foot of the middle prospect. Boulders run across, temples loom and streams rush. In the close-up view, a group of travelers are struggling on the mountain road. The whole picture is full of depth, tranquility and great weather.
Although the shape of the main peak is a combination of simple and generalized triangular structures, with small trees standing side by side on the peaks, and the stone surface is covered with parallel "raindrops", the work vividly captures the characteristics of the scenery in the Shaanxi region of northwestern China: the trees there grow in the soil deposited by the wind and sand on the stone mountain. The individual tree stones all appear to be frontal, stacked on top of each other, and the space is processed into its own isolation.
The vertical picture is divided into three segments, from front to back: small figures in the foreground, trees in the middle, and towering peaks in the background – each with a suggestive ground plane from a different perspective, leaning backwards away from the viewer.
According to the Northern Song Dynasty official Xiu Xuanhe Pictorial Genealogy, Fan Kuanbu lived between the Taihua in the south of the south and the foothills of the rocky forest, and viewed the scene of its bleak clouds and smoke, the wind and moon and the gloom. When The encounter between the silent and the divine, as soon as it is placed between the ends of the pen, it is like a thousand rocks, and it is like walking in the vagina of the mountain, although it is awe-inspiring in the middle of the summer, making people eager to hold it. Therefore, the whole world is called forgamousness and mountain transmission.
The mountain has three distances, from the bottom of the mountain to the top of the mountain, it is said to be high and far; from the front of the mountain to the back of the mountain, it is said to be far-reaching; from the near mountain to the distant mountain, it is said to be flat and far. Guo Xi set the proportional relationship between people, trees, and mountains: there are three mountains, mountains are greater than wood, and wood is greater than people. If the mountain is not as heavy as a tree, then the mountain is not large; if the wood is not as large as a man, the wood is not large.
Fan Kuan's "Journey to the Creek and Mountain" shows a sublime feeling through the proportions of jumping: tiny figures are placed in front of huge trees, while both are placed under the huge mountain peaks. The blank interval of space is not only used to express contrast, but also leaves a lot of room for imagination.
The abrupt composition of "thick peaks, strong and majestic, and far-reaching beyond the seat" in the axis of "Xishan Travel Map", the expression method of "taking its potential from afar and taking its quality from close", the old and hard ink line outline and the uniform and thick raindrops are all the concrete embodiments of Fan Kuan's landscape paintings full of texture and sense of quantity.
The whole picture conception is a series of images, which must be interpreted part by section and motif in turn, and the grand landscape painting is not an actual natural scene, but a conceptual scene of the macroscopic universe.
Through chic conception and grasp, the painter superimposes different views and experiences, as well as rich variations, into a whole. The viewer browses paragraph after paragraph, subject after subject, and when looking back, it is not only the visual impression of nature, but a whole and real landscape.
In the Song and Yuan dynasties, master painters took Fan Kuan's paintings as examples. Li Tang in the early Southern Song Dynasty, and some later Ma Yuan, Ni Yunlin and Wang Meng in the Xia Guiyuan Dynasty all praised Fan Kuan's painting style. Almost all famous painters, when it comes to the expressiveness of Fan Kuan's landscape paintings, agree that "Fan Kuan's paintings cannot look away from the seat", and Fan Kuan's paintings, looking at it from a distance, give people a feeling of immersion. Zhao Mengfu, a famous calligrapher and painter of the Yuan Dynasty, believed that Fan Kuan "painted mountains, and all wrote about the power of Qin Longjun. The big picture is wide, the mountain is compelling, and the ancient and modern are also unique."
Majestic peaks, lush forests, and abrupt boulders depict majestic natural scenery; the small caravans of merchants between the mountain roads show the pulse of human life, and nature and human life activities are in harmony.