Almighty painter

Chapter 577 Romantic Spirit
The drawing of "The Little Prince" did not reflect this problem because he flipped through the thin fairy tale book again and again and listened to Mr. Sloth read it over and over again.

For many classic passages in his works, Gu Weijing does not need any extra thinking.

I can recite it fluently.

Mr. Sloth is a person with extremely profound and high literary and artistic accomplishment.

The language is fluent, the thinking is clear, and the insights are unique.

My own extreme familiarity with the text, the careful guidance of my agent, and the help of the little candle of the Muse.

So when the eighteen-year-old Gu Weijing met the one hundred and twenty-year-old Saint-Exupéry, after a deep dream, he painted those eyes gazing at the starry sky on canvas.

Collector Chen Shenglin must be a person with very good artistic qualities.

But Gu Weijing had only met the other party for the first time, and at most they had chatted on the phone once or twice.

It is difficult for a person to truly understand another person through just one meeting.

Therefore, this painting "Good Luck Orphanage in the Sunlight No. 20" was destined to be a painting in which form outweighs content in his hands.

He was unable to accurately guess the collector's state of mind, and because he gave up thinking, he abandoned his own understanding.

From being neither Chinese nor Western, it became another kind of weird.

Gu Weijing has no way of having the life experience that Boss Chen has.

But it was also impossible for Chen Shenglin to integrate himself so closely into the life of the orphanage like Gu Weijing and become truly familiar with the people and things here.

They have different outlooks on life, different environments, and different people they meet.

……

Gu Weijing met the good man Uncle Alai, met the little girl Jasmine who should have been fragile but lived strong, and met Miss Koko who was from a family that had fallen on hard times but was still very cool.

While looking at the mural, he saw the hug of little Cao Xuan in the alleys of the Magic City ninety years ago, and the smile of the prostitute's daughter.

Maybe.

When they reach middle age, they have seen more of the joys and sorrows in society that are beyond their control.

Like many grandpas and grandmas, Gu Weijing would start to cross his hands and mutter gossip like "Everything is fate, it's all determined by God, there's nothing we can do about it."

He will also come to believe that all human free will is just an illusion.

One would think that at the moment of the Big Bang, as the atoms and molecules that make up the world flew out, their speed and direction were determined, and that until the final heat death, they would forever follow Newton's laws of motion.

Therefore, all the endings have already been written in the book of fate and can no longer be changed.

But until now.

There was still fire burning in Gu Weijing's heart.

He is still a young man, and his heart is still full of youth.

Everything in that world, all the good, all the evil, all the love, all the hatred, all the changes in the world, are nothing more than a huge clock of fate, with the noise of the tightly meshed small gears under the dial. The fluctuations caused by all spiritual struggles will be returned to zero at midnight by God's clockmaker. Mechanical determinism belongs to the loneliness and desolation of the old scientists of the 17th century, such as Newton, Laplace, Spinoza and Holmes.

Gu Weijing was just a young man.

Teenagers are always synonymous with passion and enthusiasm.

Their hearts are full of mockery and ridicule of fate.

They don't believe in bad luck.

Don't compromise, don't hesitate.

Always believe in hope.

People who are willing to stubbornly believe in hope under any circumstances will inevitably give outsiders a sense of foolish naivety.

But naivety with a touch of silliness is the privilege of young people.

But for a person who has truly experienced suffering and evil, who has walked through muddy swamps and stood in storms and rain, and who is still willing to believe in hope and love himself, then... this kind of stupidity will transform into true heroism.

Jasmine is such a little girl.

Koko is such a little heroine.

Uncle Alai is such a tough guy.

Mr. Lian Cao, a nearly 100-year-old man, wrote his last work, a review and summary of his life, which turned out to be a mural with the word "hope" hidden in his eyes.

Isn’t he still the same young man as before?
The shackles are broken.

The gloomy black veil covering "Good Luck Orphanage in the Sunshine No. 20" seemed to have a corner torn.

It seemed as if sunlight was flowing out from it like mercury leaking out from the ground.

Gu Weijing followed the impulse in his heart.

He picked up the pen, dipped it in the sunlight, and started painting.

If this is the ultimate work you want to take to an exhibition.

Therefore, it is not a wise move to suddenly change the overall details of the familiar picture that you have practiced before the exhibition.

But Gu Weijing did not hesitate for a moment.

What does the Good Luck Orphanage look like under the real sun? Before he realized it, he had already used his body as a paintbrush to copy it on the canvas day and night after day.

It's as familiar as breathing, isn't it?
Composition has never been important. What is important is the carrier of the spirit.

The pencil quickly drew the lines on the canvas.

Gu Weijing once again adjusted the position of the statue of the Virgin Mary.

For the first time, he placed the Madonna in the center of the picture, where the sun was shining brightest, because this was the most common way of treating images such as the Madonna in works in the painting appreciation course at school.

The second time, he turned the Madonna into the fulcrum of the oblique side of the painting, where the shadows were the thickest, because of Chen Shenglin's guidance and also because of the country's colonial history.

This time.

Gu Weijing didn't do that.

The Madonna is not glorious because that is not the truth.

Because at least here.

The colonists brought with them statues of the Virgin Mary, but they did not spread her gentle light to others.

The Madonna should not be the source of the gloomy atmosphere of the entire painting.

Because it doesn't deserve it.

Why must the lives of the poor be gloomy just because of poverty, suffering, and hardship? Why must the sunshine on them be dimmer than on others?

Why can't they have a brave and strong heart?

Just because of the curse of a statue of the Virgin Mary?
Or is it just because of the unfairness of fate?

The statue of the Virgin Mary is just a simple sculpture.

It has not become the belief in the lives of the people here, nor is it worthy of becoming a gloomy yoke hanging over their heads.

These two treatments, whether positive or negative, are still religious.

When Gu Weijing painted this picture, what was surging in his heart was the human spirit.

How can a truly free soul be bound by a small statue?

This time, Gu Weijing re-adopted the simplest focal perspective composition.

He adjusted the visual focus of the entire painting. In the center of the picture is Uncle Alai who is washing little girl Jasmine's hair. On both sides are flowers, trees, and children playing.

The previous two works both present a triangular shape.

The current composition has become simpler, from a three-sided pyramid composition to a cross-shaped composition that can be decomposed into two dimensions, horizontal and vertical.

The vertical line in the center of the cross represents Uncle Alai.

He occupies the most important position in the picture.

Gu Weijing imagined that the sunlight passed through the clouds, through the shadow of the old locust tree, and shone down from Uncle Alai's head, appearing mottled and dazzling.

Uncle Alai supports the vertical space of the picture; his back, his head, and the sunlight above his head form a straight line.

The upward spatial growth trend of the entire painting is supported by the gatekeeper.

His shoulders are the horizontal line of the entire picture, flush with the horizon that divides the earth and the sky in the distance. Together with the scenery extending on both sides, they form the horizontal line of the cross.

The statue of the Virgin Mary, the plants, the buildings, and the walls are just ordinary silhouettes in the background.

It is neither particularly bright nor particularly gloomy and heavy.

To the little girl who was washing her hair, the statue of the Virgin Mary might be just an ordinary piece of stone, but the dark-skinned gatekeeper was ten thousand times more important than the broken statue.

That is the god in her heart.

The biggest advantage of cross-shaped focal perspective composition is its simplicity.

It is solemn because of its simplicity and noble because of its simplicity.

In Gu Weijing's writing, there is the solemnity and the sublimity of human nature.

Composition, drafting, depicting, applying base color, adjusting color temperature range, shaping volume, analyzing the bright and dark parts of the picture to deepen the shadows.

It is difficult to paint an unfamiliar work of new composition too quickly.

There are too many steps that need to be completed honestly and step by step. Being fast means being anxious, and being anxious means making mistakes.

The faster Gu Weijing painted, the calmer he felt.

"Yes, that's it, that's it. The blue of the sky here affects the highlights. Here, the edges of the leaves can be painted looser, blending a blurred edge into the sharp edge of the building next to it..."

This is not a strange work.

He was already very familiar with each individual scene and detail through repeated practice, and the composition of the painting was hidden in his body.

The faster he painted, the clearer the scene in his mind seemed to become, and the smoother his brushwork became.

Gu Weijing paints following his inspiration and dances on paper following his emotions.

It is not as simple as putting together a jigsaw puzzle, smashing the painting "Good Luck Orphanage in the Sunlight No. 20" next to it with a hammer, taking out each individual detail independently, picking them out again, and then putting them back on the canvas in front of you.

What Gu Weijing did was not permutation and combination in the mathematical sense.

It is about re-understanding the world in an artistic sense.

When your spirit, technique and understanding of the scenery you paint have reached a perfect level, the secrets of color will suddenly reveal themselves to you.

If Katsuko Sakai were here right now.

She would probably tell him with a smile that this is what she calls "the revelation of the heart."

If Mr. Sloth saw the subtle but essential difference between the old works around Gu Weijing and the images that gradually took shape on the drawing board over time.

Then Miss Elena would probably not be able to help but applaud softly, and then analyze it more precisely, using the refined tone of a critic, calling it "the progress of instinctive senses."

This is one of the most valuable evolutions that can be achieved during the practice of a work.

Winston Churchill once described this state as "a person opening his eyes again."

Well known.

A Nobel Prize winner in literature who cannot knit or paint cannot make a good British politician.

After all, Churchill was the grandson of a legitimate British duke and had received the most orthodox elite art education since childhood.

His aesthetic accomplishment is still very good.

Although he did not start to paint tirelessly until he was 40, and later received the title of Honorary Member Painter of the Royal Society of Arts, to be honest, it was also partly because everyone wanted to flatter the "heroic prime minister."

But Churchill's oil painting skills were quite good.

Picasso thought it was fair to say that with this level of skill, it should not be a problem for him to make a living as a professional painter.

At least his talent is much better than that World War I veteran on the other side of the war front who couldn't get into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

In a letter to Anna’s great-grandfather, the Prime Minister once said: “Suddenly one day, the familiar world became different in my eyes. The gauze covering my eyes was lifted little by little, and the world began to reveal its secrets to me. The dreamy, purple shadows of the mountains. The wonderful edges of the branches in winter, the dim, faded silhouettes on the distant horizon... It’s incredible that I have lived for forty years and never noticed them!”

Mr. Sloth couldn't help but tell Gu Weijing that this kind of sensory improvement is the foundation of artistic accomplishment, and when combined with appropriate techniques, it can create the miracle of color.

What if Cao Xuan was standing nearby at this moment and saw what the young man was doing while painting?

The little old man would say nothing, just stand there, leaning on his cane, and smiling.
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At level 6, the oil painting technique is significantly ahead of Chinese painting and sketching, and is the biggest strength of Gu Weijing's brushwork.

The brushstrokes and colors of oil paintings have also become the lubricant that blends the two.

Gu Weijing painted on the canvas the rough yet warm feeling of Uncle Alai's skin, which was enough to depict the slightly raised curve of Jasmine's black hair after it was wet.

soon.

Gu Weijing was satisfied with this little technique in depicting the skin and hair.

He painted faster and faster, but mentally he became more and more relaxed.

No longer paying attention to this kind of meticulous control.

I just let the tip of the pen follow my body and fall on the linen cloth, but my mind flies far away.

He once again recalled the day when he saw Mr. Cao’s “Pray to Buddha and Protect the Dharma” in the square of the Shwedagon Pagoda.

A thousand people have a thousand ways, a thousand Buddhas have a thousand faces, and a thousand faces have one heart.

When Mr. Cao paints Bodhisattvas, the focus is not on the Bodhisattva's physical appearance, but on the Bodhisattva's eyes, eyes formed by the gazes of thousands of people over a hundred years.

Be it Bodhisattva or Buddha.

The carrier is never the point.

The key point is the temperament of the painting, which is the word "hope" contained in Mr. Cao's heart.

So, what should the temperament of this painting be?

(End of this chapter)