Yunshan is full of gas, and the gods are dense, tracing the sages. To love home in the mountains, beauty is better than orchestra.
In the current landscape painting creation, it has become a common concern to strengthen the spirit and seek the interest of pen and ink. Chen Keyong, a young painter who has just been elected as the director of the Beijing Artists Association, has taken a solid step in the unification of the two after years of hard exploration, and naturally received unanimous praise from experts and audiences. Watching the landscape paintings of Chen Keyong, president of China Landscape Painting Research Institute, the first thing that attracts people's attention is that its magnificent scenery seems to go beyond the limitation of specific time and space, and great beauty is integrated with lofty spirit. Many of his works, with mountains as the main body, are full of mountains, clouds and springs, but no one is seen. However, uninhabited mountains and valleys have been personified, and clearly glow with full and high-spirited humanistic spirit. As you can imagine, in Chen Keyong's concept, there is no "dichotomy between subject and object" of western painters at all, only "things are me" and "harmony between man and nature" of China painters. No matter what he painted was the vast Yanshan Mountains, the ancient trees tinkling on the vast sea, or the surging Yellow River falling from the sky, all of them deeply injected the historical memory and realistic excitement of the whole nation, and all of them reflected the ancient and vibrant national spirit that had already been integrated into the mountains and deserts. This is closely related to his inheritance of the fine tradition of landscape painting. Taking landscape as a great space for national survival and emotional projection of lofty spirit is a valuable tradition that China's landscape painting has already formed. For painters who are well versed in traditional mysteries, landscape painting is the unity of people's free and unrestrained creative spirit and the vigorous vitality of yin and yang fumigation of nature. It is an ode to the living environment that stands in historical time and space and contains spiritual culture. It is a lively life, a lovely homeland and a spiritual home full of pride and self-confidence.
These traditional works are panoramic landscapes of northern painters in the Five Dynasties and the Northern Song Dynasty. The world-famous The Journey to the West in Fan Kuan not only excites everyone who loves tradition, but Liu Ye, who once sought an anti-traditional way out for western painting, witnessed the existence of this painting, which produced a strong shock and gave birth to the motivation to return to tradition spiritually. However, this tradition of landscape painting has long been lost. /kloc-After the 0/2nd century, the cultural center moved south, the painters in the north dropped sharply, the landscape painters in the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties changed their mentality, and the landscape in the south of the Yangtze River was beautiful, which eventually led to the landscape painting from heroic to beautiful, magnificent to simple. Later, with the popularity of antique customs, beautiful landscape painting further embarked on a narrow road of formulation. Although there are many famous artists, it has generally declined. In the past hundred years, landscape painters who are determined to reform, in order to reverse the decadent style of copying ancient times, began to learn from the ancients with the spirit of being scientific and realistic, and changed the freehand brushwork of calligraphy painting into realistic portrait, and changed from sketching to landscape painting. Although he gained a lot in describing the humanistic landscape that keeps pace with the times, he did not fully understand the difference between science and art in grasping the world. Influenced by western landscape paintings that pay attention to space, he has added flavor to life, but there are few powerful and brilliant works. It was not until the 1980s of reform and opening up that some painters were trained to revive the landscape tradition of the Northern Song Dynasty and carry forward the national spirit in the Five Dynasties. With deep feelings for the country and the motherland, these painters rooted their creations in the depths of local life, and created immortal works with the true scenery of the mountains and rivers in the north as the theme, with a "view of heaven and man" different from that of westerners and emphasizing the rigorous realistic style of pen and ink language. They are vigorous and simple, full of weather, vigorous and broad, and worthy of their predecessors. In this respect, the middle-aged painter Jia Youfu's Monument to Taihang Mountain has long been praised by the world, and Chen Keyong is one of the few outstanding young painters.
The second striking feature of Chen Keyong's landscape painting is the unity of great beauty and rich mirror images. Great beauty is an indescribable beauty, just like "the elephant is invisible" and "the voice is sparse", such as "the antelope is hanging on the horn and there is no trace to be found" If the visual image is not handled well, it will be empty. However, Chen Keyong dialectically understood the relationship between "great beauty is speechless" and "fullness is called beauty", and successfully created visual factors such as elephants, vast territory, potential and quality. Especially in his flagship masterpiece, the composition is full, but the towering mountains show a great sense of volume and endless sense of space against the backdrop of the dense forest of Yushu and the rushing clouds. The place where ancient literati painters preferred no painting disappeared, and the long poems that opened the painting scene with literary language were omitted. What is left is only the fine and intricate structure of the dark and bright changing rocks, only the meticulous forest that fluctuates in space, only the flowing clouds and flowing water that are sometimes dark and scattered, and sometimes the spring water that jumps and flows. Faced with this highly generalized idealized landscape, it seems to be in a reality full of visual details. After careful study, it can be found that in order to achieve this ornamental effect, Chen Keyong handled the relationship between quality and potential, distance and proximity in an ingenious way, "taking the overall situation as small" and "seeing the big from small". As far as the whole painting is concerned, he pays attention to "taking the grand view as small as possible" and "taking the potential as much as possible", and expands his horizons as much as possible, just as the author stands on the opposite top of the mountain and looks at this magnificent and boundless scenery. This means of pushing the close shot away, because it is good at "accommodating the potential", has caused a magnificent video. However, if we focus on the overall situation from a distance, it will inevitably dilute many wonderful details and be vague, making it more difficult to create the feeling that "the mountain starts from the human face". For this reason, in the description of local concrete images, Chen Keyong also strives to "see the big from the small" and "get the essence from the near", bringing the distant mountain closer to the fullest, tirelessly showing its strength and tenacity, and depicting its ever-changing structure and indescribable texture, as if trying to attract the audience to watch this extremely rich and memorable fragment. Abandoning the focus perspective and using the traditional proportion of "Zhang Shan Shu Chi" in space processing is enough to make the viewer always look up at the mountains standing at the foot of the mountain, just like enjoying the landscape paintings of Fan Kuan in the Northern Song Dynasty, resulting in the wonder of "looking into the distance without sitting outside". In order to reproduce the quality of the landscape in the most subtle way, Chen Keyong often regards a boulder as a mountain and a grass as a big tree, studies it deeply, and even moves the nameless boulder with wonderful texture home to meet day and night. This observation and expression method of "its size is nothing, its size is nothing" is an effective means to enrich the magnificent space with real and rich details. Only by adopting this method can its spiritual capacity and emotional strength be obviously expanded with a visual image.
The third striking thing about Chen Keyong's landscape painting is that he is good at changing the ancient method into my method and seeking the extra-legal method in strict statutes. The so-called ancient method, although simply understood as ancient painting, actually includes two aspects. The first is the universal law of artistic expression of China's landscape paintings reflected by ancient pen and ink language. For example, it must obey the generalization and meaningful extraction of objects, and it must also obey the vivid and effective communication of painter's temperament. We must also use as many factors of unity of opposites as possible to express the relatively independent beauty of pen and ink. Second, it conforms to the above-mentioned artistic expression law and has personal characteristics. As far as the universal law is concerned, it is accumulated from the understanding of generations of painters. Without hard work, you can't understand it, let alone be handy. As far as personality style is concerned, it is the artistic creation of every painter and the symbol of his own style. Without thorough analysis, you can't learn the experience of creating your own pen and ink style. It is precisely because of understanding the above truth that Chen Keyong did not break away from the performance law reflected by the ancient law, did not do anything unconventional, and did not break away from his own observation of life to rush to piece together the ancient law. First of all, he followed the pen and ink of the ancients, such as how Wang Meng's thirsty and rambling pen and ink properly represented the lush vegetation in the mountains, and how Gong Xian's pen and ink vividly described the humid, quiet and lush scenery in the south of the Yangtze River. Secondly, he also discussed how to summon images from the function of pen and ink, for example, why trees from Wen Zhiming, Dong Qichang to Gong Xian are painted in longitudinal sections, and the leaves are completely on the back of branches. Furthermore, he also thought about the beauty of brushwork, such as how Wang Meng's brushwork can be orderly in chaos, and why Gong Xian's ink accumulation can achieve the miraculous effect of seeing thick in thin and bright in black. In addition, he also analyzed the language of landscape painting, and saw that the painter's language ability and language characteristics are not only reflected in the vocabulary of a tree and a stone, but also in the combination way of making sentences with vocabulary and finally connecting them into articles. Therefore, he believes that to learn the language of landscape painting, we should start with vocabulary sentence-making, learn sentence by sentence, and study a combination way. However, no matter how to choose words and make sentences or the layout of articles, we must first master the language of our predecessors, and then use their observation and refinement methods to form our own life language. It is based on this understanding that Chen Keyong finally formed a unique pen and ink language feature not far from tradition. In isolation, his descriptions of scraping iron, raindrops, broken belts and chopping axes in mountains and high mountains are all related. His description of antlers and the rescue point of Lin Qiu, a miscellaneous tree, all come from predecessors, and even his thin pen for painting waterfalls and flowing springs can be seen as Li Keran's influence. However, in connection, the mountains and rivers in Chen Keyong exaggerate the roundness of the overlapping mountains with heavy ink. The heavy ink and the layered crown tension make it vigorous and magnificent, which is unprecedented by predecessors and presents a unique painting language style.
As a down-to-earth and honest painter for many years, Chen Keyong has made remarkable achievements, but his landscape painting art is still developing. In my opinion, there are still some shortcomings from time to time. For example, a small landscape always feels that a large part has been intercepted, vigorous and magnificent. Some works depicting specific landscapes sometimes weaken the strength of pen and ink language by absorbing western methods, and they also feel inadequate in production methods and pen and ink treatment. Of course, if you want to make progress, you have to explore, and the lack of exploration is inevitable. As long as you stick to the road of reaching out to the essence of tradition and the depth of life with one hand, and continue his aesthetic ideal of not seeking fame and fortune and expressing great beauty and lofty, his art will surely leap into a new situation in the near future, and I hope for it.