"Looking around for dreams several times, new accent and old tune", this is my description of myself. Two sentences can sum up me, my artistic creation and my mental journey of more than 30 years. Look around. The traditional education of reading ancient prose, reciting poems and learning calligraphy and painting, which I received since I was a child, came into contact with almost all the pure China education, which was full of "what is it" and "Confucius tells poems", and refused and rejected English (and later paid a painful price), just wanting to become a traditional painter like a famous artist in Song and Yuan Dynasties. At that time, I almost spent an hour or two practicing calligraphy during my lunch break, completely ignoring the urgency of my homework. I don't know how many times I've visited the Magu Fairy Altar, Yan Monument, Temple Monument, Su Dongpo's Drunk Pavilion Monument and Fengle Pavilion Monument in Yan Zhenqing. The study of Chinese painting on weekends and weekdays began with Biography of Mustard Garden, from one tree to one stone to modern people such as Shandong, Shandong and Shandong, and they were almost crazy about traditional landscapes. A knife paper for three months, a bottle of ink for dozens of days, let me lay a deep foundation of traditional art, and because of this, Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts won the first place in the national Chinese painting major in the college entrance examination, but because of this, my English score did not reach the bottom line of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts at that time, and I was admitted to ludong university, a provincial university.
Perhaps it was fate that I met Mr. Liu Aimin, the former head of the Oil Painting Department of Xi Academy of Fine Arts, when I was studying Chinese painting in ludong university, the legendary swordsman. His on-demand and guidance made a young man full of resentment at that time start the road of learning and creating oil paintings. Teacher Liu was very kind to me, not only opened a brand-new door to art for me, but also took me on the road, took good care of me, even advised me to drop out of school many times, and later suggested that I go abroad for further study. In addition, as Mr. Liu is a student of 1985 "Zhao Wuji Master Class", he also promised that I could introduce Master Zhao Wuji while studying in France. But fate is still joking with me, dropping out of school, learning French, refusing visas, and going back to eastern Shandong. After that, I was immersed in the creation of oil painting and ink painting, and rarely attended classes. Fortunately, Jiang Yong 'an, director of the teaching and research section of Chinese painting, protected me from punishment, had enough time to create, and gave me a lot of correct opinions on the art of ink painting. Later, after hard work, I was admitted to the Tsinghua University Academy of Fine Arts as a graduate student majoring in oil painting, and was accepted as a pioneering disciple by Yan Dongwang. For nearly three years, he was able to go deep into traditional oil painting. In addition to important western art classics, I also exhibited and read many western philosophers' classics in Tsinghua University Library, and gained a lot. Of course, ink painting and tradition have never been far away from my life during this period. Therefore, "looking east and looking west" summarizes the way I study and seek art, and "new tune and old tune" is the best interpretation of my artistic creation and pursuit. I have always believed that art never takes the pursuit of innovation as its life like science and technology. The so-called "innovation" and "change" are just dreams brought by the industrial revolution and scientific and technological progress since the beginning of the 20th century. Art has never come from the outside. On the contrary, it requires the individual artist to constantly torture life and soul from the inside. The problems that artists face and need to solve today will not be more or less, more difficult or easier than those of the ancients. Because those profound basic questions about life, life and human beings have almost never changed, but they are presented and sought in another form. There will never be a unified answer to these questions. Just as life is colorful and full of vitality because of "uncertainty" and "impermanence", because there is no unified answer, it is even more necessary for generations to keep asking questions, and every individual presentation of these questions will become a part of the answer. Therefore, "old tune" is necessary, because art pursues a profound and thoughtful core, rather than a popular and novel style. Specific to my "old tune", I have been converted to Buddhism for more than ten years, I have my thoughts and feelings about life, I have grand and profound questioning, and I have the wonderful use of fetching water and firewood.
In addition, we need to talk about the "new tone", because sticking to the rules and sticking to the rules is naturally not art, and art needs a new form that conforms to the development of the times and needs the responsibility of "keeping pen and ink with the times". So after studying ink painting and oil painting techniques systematically, I began to explore the new direction of combining oil painting with various materials. So I groped out a road of material oil painting that belongs to me. After years of experiments and explorations, various unique materials such as transparency, translucency, matt, brightness and crack have been combined with oil painting and Tan Perez Na technique to become my artistic language. The series of works of material oil painting "The Covered World", from the laying of white background and the establishment of boundaries to the covering of layers of materials on the image, are trying to emphasize the distance and separation behind them through materials and media to remind viewers to pay attention to it, so as to guide viewers to appreciate and live more soberly and independently without falling into other people's world. In recent ink and wash works, I tried to emphasize the sense of isolation through the background color and boundary. At the same time, I put the object itself in the center of the background color and kept a considerable distance from its surroundings, so that even if the viewer is close to the picture, there is always an insurmountable distance in the picture. The accumulation and washing of multiple layers make the image of the picture blurred and dissipated, and the use of dot-line-surface rubbing causes the surrounding space to squeeze the object image, as well as the resistance of the object image to this extrusion and the tremor of life. It is a great vitality of individual life in loneliness, dissipation and extrusion. In the final analysis, pen and ink and materials are just means, and the "new tune" is only to interpret the profound and original "old tune" more vividly and with the spirit of the times.
In short, distance, separation, the relationship between the subject and the surrounding space in the picture, and the loneliness of the subject itself are all "old tunes" that I have been paying attention to and exploring. The isomorphism of material oil painting and new ink forms has become my "new cavity". This is a complete art world in Zhao Lu. Ink painting and materials, "new tune" and "old tune" are indispensable, and they cooperate with each other and complement each other.