Almighty painter

Chapter 22
Gu Weijing recognized the origin of the painted mural in front of him.

As a very classic Buddhist mural, the picture of worshiping the Buddha and protecting the Dharma is a relatively common shape in the mural groups influenced by the Eastern Xia cultural circle such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Southeast, Yunnan, Guizhou, Myanmar, and Thailand.

This mural is about two meters wide and one meter high. The scenes in the picture are detailed and the characters are rich. There are not only Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, celestial maidens, Dharma protectors, but also human kings, queens, concubines, even little ghosts and There are many animals listening to Zen, such as lions, tigers and leopards at the feet of Guanyin.

Unfortunately, the painting is incomplete.

A huge crack peels off from the left and runs through the celestial girl with plump skin and solemn expression, the maid holding a flower bowl, the queen walking slowly with her hands clasped together, and a group of concubines supporting banners behind her, and even the great Guanyin. side of the cheek.

Gu Weijing shook his head regretfully, these scars directly destroyed the shape of this exquisite mural.

Myanmar's cultural relics and historic sites have suffered several disasters.

The group of Dunhuang murals in Eastern Xia was very sadly destroyed during the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, and a large number of scroll paintings were bought by Western adventurers.

The same thing is by no means uncommon in modern Southeast Asia. Similar things still happen in the ruins of Buddhist scriptures and mural groups in ancient cities such as Bagan in eastern Myanmar.

Especially in many cases, a large number of foreign tourists and locals have imperfect awareness of cultural relics protection, which makes it more difficult to preserve cultural relics.

Gu Weijing is not a cultural relic expert, he can even come here as a painter, seeing such a beautiful historic site being destroyed is also very heartbreaking for him.

"Can you get such a difficult task?"

Gu Weijing shook his head, quickly opened the powder book of the manuscript in his hand, and compared the content on it to roughly browse the restoration plan of this mural.

This kind of murals with a few parts that disappear directly is the most difficult to restore.

The cracks in the picture completely destroyed the overall beauty of the mural, but more than 80.00% of the original mural color remained intact.

Such fresco monuments directly covered by repainting is a wasteful crime.

In general, there are three different treatments.

It is possible to only carry out protective repairs without artistic repairs. This method can be added with a wooden keel frame or the like, which is the simplest.

If the process is more complicated, the current common practice in developed countries in Europe is to fill the gaps in the broken murals with a good layer of soil, and then cover a thin layer with light-colored pigments that are similar in color to the surrounding areas. This method is called For the hatching method.

The hatching method is one of the commonly used methods in Western mural restoration in recent years, which was proposed by Cesare Brandi, an Italian art restoration scholar.

In the restoration of murals, he advocated "making the incomplete part the background of the painting, not the other way around", and proposed to use spaced lines to weaken the relationship between light and shade at the complement, so as to reflect the relationship between identifiability and the whole.

In recent years, this technique has also begun to appear in the restoration process of oriental paintings on silk and Dunhuang murals.

Its advantage is that it can ensure that the original paintings and calligraphy are not damaged, but its disadvantage is that it will leave obvious repair marks, just like a few drops of light blue sea water appearing in a dark blue ocean, which makes people notice it at a glance. The difference between the two.

The most difficult thing is a complete traceless restoration, trying to restore the original appearance of the painting with pigments in an authentic way.

Compared with the first two methods, this method has obvious advantages, and it completely gives the mural a new life.

But why is this approach used less?
The reason is that it is too difficult.

If it is not done well, there will be repeated color differences between the post-repair and the original picture, and it will look like the cream on a person's face has not been wiped off.

The so-called dog tail continued mink, nothing more than the case.

This mural uses the third most difficult process.

Gu Weijing flicked through the signatures on the manuscript. The column of the person directly in charge of this mural was signed by Cao Xuan's name, and Mr. Cao was directly responsible for this painting.

At this time, the blank space of the No. 17 mural in front of me has been filled with broken repair clay, and someone has used exquisite craftsmanship to re-draw the broken ink line with a brush and repair it.

The cracks in the murals left blank spaces waiting to be painted.

The painter's line draft restoration skills are very exquisite, which is amazing.

It doesn't mean that there is no problem with the repaired strokes, but it is 100% perfect.

Rather, its art style maintains a very high consistency with the original murals in terms of the technique of using the pen and the thickness of the ink lines.

Except that the color is slightly thicker because the ink line has just dried.

Judging from Gu Weijing's vision of being blessed by "Mojie's Notes", it is impossible to see the traces of acquired repairs.

Any artist has his own unique style, but the person who repaired this mural can completely integrate his own style into the style of the original monument, which is amazing.

For cultural relics restoration, the truth is more important than the good.In other words, the truth is the greatest good.

"I don't know whether it was Mr. Cao's disciple who drew the lines on the wall against the manuscript, or Mr. Cao wrote the pen himself."

Gu Weijing took out the palette and began to experiment with the color palette.

Restoring murals with complex compositions and color changes of a large number of different characters is not a small challenge even for him who owns "The Notes of Majie".

He wrote very carefully, even a little hesitant.

For a moment, Gu Weijing really suspected that in terms of the difficulty of this mural, this was not a mural restoration work that he could have access to.

He never thought that someone would harm him, but he just wondered if the staff were negligent.

However, the opportunity is rare.

He was really itchy.

There is a more important reason, he is a painter.

He doesn't think anyone can mix paints better than himself who has obtained "Moji's Notes".

No matter how many worries he has in his heart, Gu Weijing doesn't want to make a painting worse when he can do it well, which is a blasphemy to art.

This is the self-cultivation that the Gu family can hold a paintbrush for generations no matter how the external situation changes.

"Azurite, indigo juice, copper barium powder..."

No, the color is still a bit thick.

"Perhaps adding a little zinc white and clam powder might be more appropriate?"

……

Plaza, worship Buddha activities.

Seeing the water spray flowing in front of the altar representing the zodiac shrine, amidst the chanting of monks and monks, a peaceful and peaceful smile appeared on Mr. Cao's originally serious face.

Many painters, especially older ones, choose religious beliefs to gain spiritual peace.

There is a saying that there are no atheists in the trenches where there is constant fear, and this sentence is also applicable to artists whose spiritual world is always ups and downs.

Art and religion have something in common in the way of understanding and mastering the world.

The British esthetician Clive Bell wrote in the book "Art" that art and religion are two ways for people to get rid of the real environment and reach the state of ecstasy.Aesthetic ecstasy and religious ecstasy are two schools united.Art and religion are means to the same kind of mental state.

The art industry is prone to lunatics, and if the spirit is not strong enough, it is easy to become lonely and weird.

In the process of painting, it is common to suddenly cry, or yell at each other.

Every painter who is struggling to make progress on the road of art has experienced similar encounters——

Either the critics are dissatisfied with the painting, or I am dissatisfied.

If I am satisfied, the art critics are not satisfied, and if the critics are satisfied, I am not satisfied.

Finally, I was satisfied and the critics were satisfied, but the market was not satisfied.

In addition to the art itself, these are important reasons for the artist's insomnia, tossing and turning, hair loss and anger.

This is especially true for young painters who are still struggling.

In fact, at Mr. Cao's age and status, no outsiders can tell him what to do, and the only one who can make him feel irritable and dissatisfied is himself.

The NO.17 mural is an important reason for his bad mood.

Hundreds of years have passed, the pigments used by ancient painters and modern painters are different, and the configuration methods are different.

Not to mention, there are various signs of erosion and weathering caused by the passage of time.

Even with the most modern computer scanning analysis, it is difficult to avoid subtle color changes in the process of blending pigments.

At this time, it is more useful to rely on human experience.

However, no matter how superb Mr. Cao's technique is, he cannot completely restore the technique of ancient painters hundreds of years ago, especially the combination of paints.

It can only be close, it can only be infinitely similar, but it cannot reach the same level.

Whether it is the light and dark changes of the color or the texture of the paint, it is actually difficult to compare with those ancient painters whose father and son have secret recipes passed down from generation to generation.

During the preparation period before starting the project, Mr. Cao also anticipated possible problems by studying scanned photos and several on-site inspections.

He drew a rough draft and several different color schemes based on the photos in advance.

However, after the mural restoration project really started, it was still somewhat different from his expectations.

Although this difference in color scale is almost to the point where it is difficult to detect unless the naked eye observes closely.

But for Mr. Cao, different is different.

If he only pursues the big difference, there is no need to host this project at all.

This made the little old man a little irritable, and he proposed early that he would come to worship the Buddha in the afternoon.

"I hope the Bodhisattva can bring me good luck." Cao Lao thought.

(End of this chapter)