Wu Daozi's childhood was unfortunate. His parents died young and he lived a lonely life. Forced to make a living, he learned from folk painters and sculptors. Because of his diligence, outstanding talent, poor life and hard work, he became a talented artist prematurely. By the time he was about 20 years old, he was already a famous painter.
Although he is bent on painting, he still has to support himself. First, he became a small official under the Wei gate, and then he became a county commandant in a small place. Later, he decided to go to Luoyang, one of the economic and cultural centers at that time, and began his wandering life in Luoyang. During this period, he devoted himself to the mural creation of Taoist temple. Soon his fame spread all over Luoyang and beyond. However, his social and political status is still very low.
It was not until Li Longji, Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty, knew about him and called him to the palace to worship him that he ended his wandering life.
According to Zhu's Records of Famous Paintings in Tang Dynasty, in the middle of Kaiyuan, Wu Daozi went to Luoyang with Emperor Xuanzong of Tang Dynasty. There, he met his calligraphy teacher Zhang Xu and a famous swordsman, General Perlman. Peiman's sword dance, Li Bai's poems and Zhang Xu's cursive script are called "three beauties". According to legend, Pei Man was once surrounded by Fan troops on the battlefield. He rode a horse and waved a big knife. Although the enemy's arrows came from all directions, they were all cut off by his knife.
When Peiman met Wu Daozi, he had heard about Wu Daozi for a long time, so he wanted to invite Wu Daozi to make a mural for his dead relatives in Tiangong Temple. Wu Daozi didn't want his silk as a reward and said happily, "I've heard a lot about the general. Please dance a sword for me, enough to paint. When I appreciate your strong spirit, I can draw. " So Perlman immediately danced with a sword, turned left and right, and finally threw the sword into the clouds, reaching dozens of feet. The sword fell like lightning, just falling into the scabbard held by Perlman. There are thousands of people onlookers, all of whom are horrified.
After seeing his wonderful performance, Wu Daozi was very excited, waving his arms and swaying like a god. This mural became the most proud work of Wu Daozi's life.
That day, Zhang Xu also wrote a cursive script on impulse. People in Luoyang watched their performance and said, "In one day, you will get three miracles." This artistic event has also become a beautiful talk.
During the Tianbao period, Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty sent Wu Daozi to sketch because of the beautiful scenery in Sichuan. Wu Daozi wandered along the Jialing River, enjoying a carefree mood, leisurely time, beautiful scenery and unlimited scenery. The painter traveled with great enthusiasm and deeply engraved all his experiences and feelings in his heart.
After returning to Beijing, Xuanzong asked him about his situation, and he replied bluntly that he didn't draw a copy and kept it in mind. "Keeping in mind" is a kind of memorization by painters, and it is also a traditional method of sketching by ancient painters in China. What he remembers is not everything on the surface of mountains and rivers, but the charming realm of one mountain, one water, one mountain and one valley.
On this day, Xuanzong asked him to paint Jialing landscape on the wall of Datong Temple. According to what he remembered and felt in his heart, Wu Daozi quickly drew the beautiful scenery of "more than 300 miles on the Jialing River". Before that, Li Sixun, a painter who was good at landscape painting, also painted landscapes in Datong Hall, but he only painted for a few months. Therefore, after Wu Daozi finished painting, Xuanzong could not help but admire: "Li Sixun's achievements in a few months and Wu Daozi's achievements in a day are really wonderful." This story has also become a beautiful talk in the history of painting.
Wu Daozi is generous and informal. "Every stroke will be drunk." Therefore, he often paints while drunk. Legend has it that when he painted the round lamp on the Buddha's head in murals, he used a pen instead of a ruler. When painting in longxing temple, the audience was packed. He painted quickly, like a whirlwind, in one go. Chang 'an (now Xi), the capital at that time, was the national cultural center, where many famous literati and painters gathered. Wu Daozi often stayed with these people and improved his skills.
Wu Daozi is a prolific painter with a large number of works. It is said that there are more than 300 murals in the temple gallery, and there are more than 100 scrolls recorded. Among them, there are many Buddhist and Taoist themes, as well as landscapes, flowers, birds and animals. Unfortunately, not today. Send the Son to Heaven (the birth picture of Sakyamuni) is a work copied by the Song people. It shows the Buddhist story of Sakyamuni's father, King Sudoku, holding him to thank the gods after he was born King Sudoku. It embodies Wu Daozi's basic painting style. Wu Daozi broke the ancient (Kaizhi) and Lu (Tan) method of "even cotton is tight, like a silkworm spinning silk" for a long time, because the lines of Yousimiao are round and healthy, but like iron wire, there is no change. Wu Daozi initiated the description of Lan Ye, saying that "the pen is aboveboard and unrestrained, like water shield, the circle is converted, and Fiona Fang is concave and convex". His pen fluctuates, powerful and sparse, which shows his inner spiritual strength. At the same time, his coloring is simple and light, even without coloring. When he created, he was in a state of high excitement and tension, which smacked of expressionism. All these seem to reveal the forerunner of ink painting later.
Wu Daozi is full of creative spirit in art, saying that the change of landscape painting started from him. He used the brushwork such as orchid leaves or bamboo slips to express the pleats of clothes, and rounded them into floating trends, which Guo in the Northern Song Dynasty called "the Five Dynasties should be the wind" in Painting Spectrum. He also crossed the line with Jiao Mo, making an understatement, and was called "Wuzhuang" by the world. He expressed the sense of movement and quantity of objects through the fat and thin suppression of ink lines, which contributed to the development of line drawing. Because his brushwork is smooth and refined, his brushwork is only a little, and his image is already very correct. Later generations called him and Zhang Zengxiu "sparse" representative painters to distinguish them from Gu Kaizhi and Lu Tanwei's "dense". Su Shi rated his art as "innovative in statutes and ingenious in boldness of vision", and regarded him as a representative of Tang Dynasty painting, juxtaposed with poet Du Fu, essayist Han Yu and calligrapher Yan Zhenqing, and spoke highly of it: "As for painting in Wu Daozi, the change from ancient to modern has been completed." He was honored as a "painting saint" by later generations and as the founder of the mountain by folk craftsmen, which had a great influence on later paintings, especially the style of figure painting and line drawing.
When Wu Daozi's artistic career was in full swing, an Shi Rebellion happened in Tianbao fourteen years. Wu Daozi, who was honest and hated evil by nature, vowed not to join the disorderly army and disappeared from the painting world.
Wu Daozi, the eternal "painting saint", has made outstanding artistic achievements and will always be a bright pearl in the ancient art hall of the motherland.