Riding the wind of rebirth

After finishing the noodles, Zhou Zhi moved his wrists and neck for a while, and turned on the air conditioner to 26 degrees to prevent himself from hypothermia and stiffness.

After doing this, he poured water on the painting and began to use the accumulated water to separate the painting with tweezers and bamboo pieces.

Uncover the edge of a large piece of debris, carefully separate the stuck together pieces with bamboo pieces, press the Ming painting back to its original position, lift the Qing painting up a little more, and carefully piece the "Ink Bamboo" piece by piece. The first large fragment of the picture was uncovered.

In the same way, I still use the tension of water to spread the painting on the white paper support on one side, adjust the position, and the work is considered to have taken the first step.

Just to reveal the easiest part, Zhou Zhi checked the time and it took him more than half an hour.

I breathed a sigh of relief and took this first step. It didn’t seem too difficult...

Indeed, I am afraid that many of the professional workers in the Forbidden City who are responsible for restoring paintings, no matter how many or how precious they are, cannot even pay a fraction of the thoughtfulness. This skill must have been mastered.

The main reason was that I was too nervous before, so I changed my mind to expose the painting heart. Even though it is a work of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, the pressure is much less.

Once you focus, you won't feel the passage of time. Now Zhou Zhi can't help but feel proud that the improvements he made to the workbench based on his repair experience are now of great use.

This is a workbench over two meters long, about the size of a large double bed, with an epoxy resin spray-painted polished top. The difference from my fourth cousin’s old-fashioned lacquered workbench is that this workbench imitates Xu Anran’s drawing machine. The tabletop is covered with various rulers and divisions.

The epoxy resin itself is transparent, and the resin layer is very thick. A light strip is added to the edge. When lit, the countertop can also produce a light-transmitting effect like a window.

The ancients used the double hook method to copy paintings, that is, hanging the original work on the window, covering it with white paper, and tracing it using the principle of light transmission.

Nowadays, the habit of writing has changed. Nowadays, people sit down and write. This tabletop with a light strip can also achieve the same effect.

Of course, Zhou Zhi's restoration work was also very important. Compared with the fourth cousin's table that relied entirely on the mounting master's vision, Zhou Zhi's scaled table gave him an additional aid to make him more precise.

Pretending to be public but private, Zhou Zhi's first funding from the Three Gorges Cultural Preservation Fund was to replace all the workbenches of the Ancient Book Restoration Research Institute with this patented countertop.

Although the model is much smaller, Director Yuan was so happy that he praised Zhou Zhi as a flower. Such a workbench with its own internal light source is really important to everyone.

There are many similar improvements, such as the lighting above the worktable being changed to shadowless lighting for the operating table, which can also move and adjust the brightness as the work area changes.

For example, various repair tools were remade, from being able to work with a hard brush, a soft brush and a pot of paste, to being upgraded to a wall with various tools.

Even when making a paste, Zhou Zhi introduced measuring cups and electronic scales. He made a table of the paste concentration in various working scenarios and printed it out and posted it on the wall.

If a worker wants to do his job well, he must first sharpen his tools. These little tricks are all learned from cousin An Ran, and they are quite easy to use.

Large fragments are easy to stick but difficult to remove, while small fragments are easy to remove and difficult to stick. Each fragment must be returned to its original place, and the brushstrokes and paper fibers must be able to be connected. Should the seam in the middle be left or patched? Putting them together directly, these are the difficulties in this work process.

But fortunately, it is like playing a slightly more complex puzzle, which requires the restorer to have a considerable reserve of calligraphy and painting skills. For Zhou Zhi, there is no problem with technique, the main thing is physical strength and patience.This process is extremely helpful in deepening your understanding of the painter's brushwork. It is equivalent to having a master demonstrate it to you in detail, allowing you to understand how each stroke and every point is formed on the paper. .

Even if you are painting and shading on a daily basis, due to the influence of personal will, you often cannot understand the original work in such detail.

But restoration is different. All your own things will be discarded. The highest goal of everything is to restore the essence of the original work. The research will naturally be more in-depth than copying and shadowing.

It's as if the original author has come back to life, grabbing your hand and asking you to write and draw exactly like him.

Of course, you have to have a very high pursuit of this industry and aspire to become a master to torture yourself like this.

For most craftsmen who complete work tasks and receive wages to support their families, this layer is not exposed at all.

Gradually, "Mei Mei Tu" was uncovered bit by bit and moved to the white xanthan paper on the other side. The landscape, flowers and birds album on this side revealed its true colors bit by bit.

The Wu School of painting has been in the same vein for thousands of years. Chen Chun painted landscapes, imitating Mi Youren and Gao Kegong, and his ink paintings are full of spirit.Then he jumped out of the box and created the technique of splashing ink, expressing the color of smoke, clouds and water, which is indescribably wonderful.

He is also unique in the field of freehand flowers. His brushwork is free and smooth, with a sparse and light grace. His brushwork is like seal script and grass, and there is no illegal calligraphy. The use of ink and color is as "light" as the later generation Xu Qin praised. The traces of light color and ink are all gone!"

Xu Wei, on the other hand, took in the strengths of each family without being limited and made bold changes.Whether it is flowers or flowers and birds, they are all created with one stroke, using various ink forms such as hooks, dots, splashes, and chaps, rich movement trajectories, and ink traces with different shades, speeds, sizes, dryness, and density. The rhyme fully demonstrates what "dancing in shackles" means, the improvisation and non-repeatability of Ji Shu, and the strongest abstract expressionism in Chinese painting, giving it inner temperament and spirit, and enabling the viewer to It feels like being there.

The ink is like a cloud, and the momentum is compelling.Just as Zhang Dai said: "Today I see the paintings of Ivy, which are bizarre and transcendent, with a graceful and vigorous appearance, which is similar to the wonder of his calligraphy. In the past, people called Mojie's poems, there are paintings in the poems, and Mojie's paintings are in the paintings. There are poems; I say that the book of ivy has paintings in the book, and the painting of ivy has books in the painting."

This is the "big freehand". The two of them worked together to push Chinese painting to an unprecedented peak. Chinese freehand painting has since moved towards the highest state of writing to express strong thoughts and emotions, and freehand flower and bird paintings can be freely controlled with pen and ink on raw rice paper to express emotions. Skills have been improved to unprecedented heights.It became a milestone in the development of Chinese freehand flower-and-bird painting.

This also opened up a broad space for development for literati painting, which had struggled to make progress after the era of Wen Zhengming and Tang Bohu.

Later, Bada Shanren, Shi Tao, and the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou followed closely. In modern times, Wu Changshuo, Qi Baishi, and even all Chinese painters had a positive and far-reaching influence.

This is why Wen Zhengming commented that Chen Chun was "not my disciple" and why Zheng Banqiao called himself "the lackey of Ivy League".

Literati painting must "use calligraphy into painting", "use poetry as painting", and use the aesthetic system of poetry and calligraphy to be brought into painting.

Both Chen and Xu were poets and masters of cursive calligraphy at that time. One was evaluated as a "flying general in ink" in calligraphy, and the other dared to call himself "the first in calligraphy, the second in poetry, the third in writing, and the fourth in painting." He even praised his cursive writing as "a wise man".

It's a pity that among the painters of later generations, no one's calligraphy level can reach the height of these two, and the level of poetry is nothing like that. When projected onto painting, no matter how sophisticated the technique is, in terms of the so-called "literary spirit", it will always be A thin layer is missing.

These two monuments of freehand brushwork directly attract future generations to look up to and are almost impossible to surpass. (End of chapter)