( 1)
One of artists' lifelong pursuits is to create their own style. By this standard, Ru Gui is married. He has a large number of fans in Shaanxi and even the whole country, and Ru Gui also has a large number of loyal "fans" in Japan, which advocates China's calligraphy. He even went to Japan to give lectures, hold exhibitions, interview and make friends from 1983 to 14 times! Japanese people have further strengthened their understanding of China's calligraphy, and Japanese friends came from afar under the "lobbying" of Ru Gui and wandered in the hometown of calligraphy in Shaanxi. The reason why he has such a position in today's China has a lot to do with his success in Japan, because in the past 30 years, China has almost no artistic criticism of its own, and the judgment of value standards often fluctuates with the political floor price, media voice and award results. There are two hidden rules at work, that is, the market situation and the degree of overseas heat and cold.
Ru Gui is the son of a farmer. He studied painting first, and then China's classical literature. He studied under Huo, a master of ancient Chinese prose, and later taught Selected Works of China at school. From 1975, he began to teach calligraphy, classical literature theory and artistic aesthetics in Xi 'an Academy of Fine Arts, and later became a professor and postgraduate tutor. Until he retired, he was hired as the director of the Calligraphy Education Center.
Among contemporary calligraphers, there are only three types of combing origins: one is the so-called family study, also known as the boy school. Such a person must talk about his family background and his family studies. Then, when I was a few years old, I learned beauty, and when I was a few years old, I learned willow. With the growth of my age, I collected famous posts, suffered from hundreds of hardships, traveled all over the mountains and rivers, and with the help of one or two masters, I achieved today's realm. This is a modern version of traditional myths and cultures. The second category is the so-called prestigious schools, also known as amateur schools. This kind of people often have nothing to do with calligraphy at first, but after their business became famous, they began to be arty, grabbed the brush and scribbled, and made some moves over time. In fact, many of them are human actions. This is the origin of so-called celebrity calligraphy and painting. These three kinds are the so-called academic school and touts. In fact, there are very few such people, because they refer to their occupation. Teaching calligraphy practice or appreciating calligraphy art is their own work, and they dare not be distracted. They must stick to their jobs, improve their skills and achieve positive results. Such people are often the hope of China's contemporary calligraphy art and the sorrow of China's calligraphy art!
These three kinds of people are often intertwined and intertwined. You have me and I have you. However, under the current social form, no matter which kind or faction, there is only one way out, that is, to connect with the reality of marketization, and then whether born in pain or turned into a butterfly happily, they will be completely standardized as professional calligraphers who provide goods to the society!
The nearly 30 years since 1976 have witnessed unprecedented conflict, pattern, convergence and development in China's history, and it is also an era when people's material and spiritual lives have gone from lack of knowledge to peace and prosperity. In this era, people in the world are both excited, open and complicated. As a calligrapher engaged in serious art, it is actually very contradictory and painful!
Fortunately, Ru Gui seized the opportunity of the times, and everything seemed natural to him!
Ru Gui's works
(2) Let me talk about the foundation of Ru Gui. There is an almost unanimous voice in the field of speech: Ru Gui is a scholar calligrapher. Because in that era when writers were generally poor in writing, Ru Gui had published more than ten kinds of works, which had a sense of quantity. Then he studied his three most important books. They are Ten Lectures on Calligraphy (Shaanxi People's Fine Arts Publishing House, 5th edition, 2006, with a print run of 22,900 copies), Talking by the inkstone (Taibai Literature and Art Publishing House, second printing in June, 2003, with a print run of 3,000 copies) and Changan Hao (Shaanxi People's Fine Arts Publishing House, 2002.65438+February, 2004).
Ru Gui's academic background determines that he dabbled in calligraphy not from the artistic level, but from the artistic and literary level. Because he is from painting to literature to calligraphy. There is a detail to support this argument. Someone wrote that because the teacher who taught calligraphy in Xi Academy of Fine Arts was absent around 1975, Ru Gui went astray and got out of hand.
(3)
In China's traditional calligraphy theory, elegance is a supreme realm. Antique refers to the realm of primitive simplicity and nature, characterized by simplicity. Emphasize an elegant and straight style of writing, do not advocate the posture of avoiding danger, and do not deliberately put it down. Come to the book at will, the brushwork is exquisite, the spirit is inseparable, smart and free and easy, simple and meaningful. For mortals, many times, you don't need to know where to go, just need to know what to do now. For the wise, they are not where they are today, they need to know the direction of tomorrow!
Today's Ru Gui should become a bigger climate and reach a higher level. Because he has all the excellent qualities of China traditional literati, because he has experienced several experiences from learning painting to learning writing and then learning calligraphy, he has wandered in the world of calligraphy for thirty or forty years, because he is close to ancient times, which is a golden age for calligraphers. Especially after experiencing too many hardships in life, he turned all the twists and turns and failures that life gave him into an artistic smile and returned it to the society.
However, he did not "sink" into it. In nearly 30 years of calligraphy practice and artistic chewing, he has always had an important point of view, that is, he should be both a calligrapher and an inker. He who writes ink first always knows that "a book is a poem" and "a poem is insufficient, so a book becomes a painting" (Su Dongpo's language). In this sense, Ru Gui has a profound understanding of the essence of China's calligraphy, and it is impossible to get involved in it.