Almighty painter

Chapter 588 Backtracking
The second method of copying is to copy from memory in the true sense.

Many museums do not allow people to set up an easel on site for copying.

There are many things to pay attention to when viewing the authentic precious works in the hands of private collectors. Basically, you cannot touch them or borrow them home. If you are not his son or father, forget about it.

In someone's home, the host is willing to take out the painting and put it on the table for you to look at it for five or six hours.

It's a huge honor.

There were no new gadgets like cameras in the old society.

At this time, you need to remember the painting completely from beginning to end, and then after you go home, prepare paper and pen, and draw the painting again from memory.

This method of copying really tests the painter's memory.

The test is whether the copyist can transform the brushwork details and color changes of the original work into key points and tricks that can be memorized in his mind in just one afternoon.

Then draw it all back as thoroughly as possible.

It is already difficult to do this.

But it’s still not all that needs to be memorized.

What is more demanding than requiring a photographic memory is that if one wants to copy something from memory well, then, in addition to remembering the superficial details of the brush and ink, what is more tested is the painter's understanding of the "meaning".

It is not enough to have a good memory, you also need to be extremely insightful.

See if you can share the same spirit with the owner of this painting.

When painting landscapes, the idea comes before the brush.

Different painters, in different moods, will create works with different spirits.

Each of the master's outstanding works is different and vivid.

Some paintings are full of vigor and vitality, some are unrestrained in meaning, some are self-sufficient, and some are dense in meaning.

There are so many to list here.

Just like the teak floor under Gu Weijing's feet, each piece has different wood grain after being planed.

You will never find two identical floors, and you will never find two paintings with the same spirit.

Only when you are painting at this moment, your intention will exactly match the thoughts of the predecessors when they put pen to paper.

The work in your hands can truly come alive.

With divine inspiration, the changes in the brush and ink give the painting a lively spirit.

Otherwise, no matter how much you copy or imitate, what you copy is not your own.

It's just a piece of skin on paper, but no matter how you wear it, it can't escape the word "unoriginal".

Gu Weijing has recently encountered a bottleneck.

Not only in terms of technical level, but also in terms of copying "Old Church in a Thunderstorm".

[Impressionism Limited Mission - The Legacy of Renoir]

[Current Task: Choose to copy a work of Impressionist oil painting technique lv.7 master level or above]

【mission rewards】

[1. If the copying similarity reaches more than 20%, you will receive a primary treasure chest.]

[2. If the copying similarity reaches 50% or above, you will receive an intermediate treasure chest.]

[3. If the copying similarity reaches 90% or above, you will get a limited reward: Renoir - Human Ghost Fragments. This reward can only be obtained once.]

In the third stage, he needs to reach a similarity of more than 90% to obtain the limited rewards in the final stage.

And when the similarity of Gu Weijing's works exceeded 70%.

No matter how much you copy, the progress will not be obvious.

Or.

With his current sketching skills at the bottleneck level of Lv.5 and oil painting skills at the early stage of Lv.6, in terms of the subtle changes in the details of the brush and ink lines, even if he copied the painting stroke by stroke, he could reach % of the level of the original master, which is already close to the upper limit.

Further up.

That means you have completely entered the realm of painting that belongs to masters.

Since he has achieved a 1:1 restoration of colors and lines, Gu Weijing has reached the peak of his current technical capabilities.

The breakthrough task of sketching is also related to "spirit".

When Gu Weijing was copying the work again, he simply chose to copy it from memory.

He shifted his focus from the changes in coloring to his understanding of the painting emotions of the 19th century female painter.

Let me explain it in a simpler way.

At this point.

Gu Weijing no longer simply regarded himself as a student, and studied the painting ideas of "Old Church in Thunderstorm" stroke by stroke.

He tried to put himself in the shoes of the creators who lived more than a hundred years ago.

Try to replicate her thoughts and emotions when she was painting.

Put yourself into the process of the other person composing and coloring the picture stroke by stroke in front of the easel.

Trying to "create" this painting "Old Church in a Thunderstorm" from scratch.

Such a painting.

Gu Weijing felt as if something had suddenly become clear.

Through the brush, Gu Weijing imagined the mental journey of the artists and tried to restore the process of how Carroll used his brush to depict everything he saw, which gave him a very special sense of immersion.

There is often a feeling during the process of artistic creation.

When you stare at a work of art for too long, you become familiar with every stroke, every turn, every shade, and every tiny change.

You will be substituted in.

It's like standing at one end of a small path, staring at a shadow at the other end for a long time.

Look and look.

Hundreds and thousands of times.

You'll get closer and closer.

Until I slowly walked into that shadow, merged into one, and couldn't tell you from me.

This is the charm of art.

Amateur operagoers listen to operas too much and become obsessed with them. They can easily get carried away and start performing on stage. They cannot tell whether they are in the opera or outside of it, and they speak in an operatic accent.

Gu Jingzhou, a master of purple clay teapots, was a great fan of Chen Mingyuan, a master teapot maker during the Kangxi period. After much research, he found it difficult to tell the real teapots from the fake ones. Finally, his imitation of a dried plum teapot was identified by many experts as a utensil handed down by Chen Mingyuan, and was thus collected by the Palace Museum and the Nanjing Museum.

The editor of "Apocalypse Now" loved the photographic clips captured by the camera. Every day in the editing room, he watched the film playing in front of his eyes. Over time, he actually regarded himself as the director Coppola and the owner of the film. He secretly made a key and secretly returned to the company after get off work to delete the director's editing and edit the film himself.

After being caught and fired by Coppola, he burned the film and put the ashes in an envelope and sent it to the real Coppola as a protest.

……

Among these examples, some have begun to become as bizarre as the painted skin in Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, where it is difficult to distinguish between a human and a ghost.

Strictly speaking, the fact that the editor at the end thought of himself as director Coppola was already part of his mental problem.

Gu Weijing is far from reaching this point.

In his mind, it was like a guessing game.

The ancient Dongxia literati regarded writing poetry and fu as a mental game among friends.

The allusions, rhythm and rhyme are all extremely sophisticated. Not only do people drink wine to talk about crops and hemp, drink wine to gather friends and relatives, and drink wine to talk about the world, but also listening to the rain on the singing tower, listening to the rain in a boat, and listening to the rain under the monk's hut, all represent different states of mind in life.

Even every word is extremely particular.

The monk pushes the door under the moon, the monk knocks on the door under the moon, the spring breeze comes to the south bank of the river again, the spring breeze passes by the south bank of the river again, the spring breeze turns the south bank of the river green again.

After thinking it over and over again, he pondered over it again and again, until he finally got the right word, which met the owner's wishes. It was like the last piece of a puzzle was completed, and the two gongs fit together perfectly without any error.

With a crisp sound of "镪!"

The master was finally satisfied.

What Gu Weijing is doing now is to reverse the situation.

Painting is the painter's poetry.

The works are the poems that the artists leave behind for posterity.

The painting in front of him, "Old Church in a Thunderstorm", is a mystery left to him by the female painter Carroll.

He wants to use the answer to infer the secret and try to figure out the other person's emotions.

It's like using the poem "A Monk Knocks on the Door Under the Moon" to figure out Jia Dao's feelings when he knocked on his friend's door under the moon on a quiet night, or using the answer "42" in Miss Elena's speech to trace back to the ultimate question of the universe.

True.

Gu Weijing will never be able to truly put himself into the creative state of the female painter Carroll.

He didn't even know who the other party was.

In terms of space, they were very close to each other in the old church.

In terms of time, one is in 2023 and the other is in 1876.

The two ends of this narrow path are 147 years, or a full days apart.

All the materials in hand are now only a few lines of records in the missionary's diary wrapped in oilcloth paper found by Uncle Alai in the basement.

Time is the furthest distance in this world.

It is impossible for Gu Weijing to cross the gap of 150 years and become Carol with just a few lines of text, returning to that stormy night, feeling what she felt, and witnessing the world she witnessed.

But the fun of solving puzzles lies precisely in the unknown.

The unknown represents infinite possibilities.

What do these clouds, leaves, falling rain, candlelight, and the sharp lines of the bricks and tiles of the church standing in the rain represent?
Was this short brushstroke intentional to achieve the dense texture of rain? Was her body soaked by the heavy rain while she was painting?

Why is this spiral line treated in this way? This spiral expression is not uncommon in today's works, but in 1876, when Impressionism was still a vague and unrecognized concept.

The way the canvas is handled is quite novel.

Did Carroll really see such colors, or was it some kind of intense portrayal of his inner emotions? Does it have a similar feeling to the distorted starry sky painted by Van Gogh twenty years later?

What are these intermittent lines? Why did she develop such a painting language?

……

Gu Weijing picked up the paintbrush.

He thought slowly and painted slowly.

The curtains stretched slightly in the warm breeze and sunshine of Yangon during the June day, like a swaying stage curtain, floating gently, half exposed.
-
The curtains stretched slightly in the cold wind and sunshine of a June German night, like a swaying stage curtain, floating gently, seemingly revealing but not revealing.

Anna sat by the window, pulled open a corner of the curtains, and looked at the Baroque golden dome of the Church of Our Lady outside the window.

A sculpture of a white swan was lying there with its head and neck drooped.

It was drizzling.

Raindrops hit the sculpture, then fell down its long beak and shattered into pieces on the windshield of a blue Volkswagen Golf parked on the street.

There is an enduring legend in Europe that the swan is the most beautiful and spiritual creature in the world. It will sing the most beautiful song at the moment of its death.

"Let me climb the Sunium Cliff."

"We are the only ones left there to whisper back."

"Let me be like a swan, singing before I die."

"The land of the conquered is not my country—break the Samos cup under your feet!"

Miss Elena recited a poem softly.

It is the last stanza of the poet Lord Byron's Lamentation over Greece.

Four years after this poem was written.

This Englishman died of illness on the battlefield of Greek national liberation, and since then he became the greatest poet in the entire history of Western literature and art.

Many European poets or those who called themselves poets in later generations were extremely jealous of Byron.

I am jealous of his talent, his life, and his miserable life.

Even jealous of his death.

Anna heard that when her great-grandfather was in school, the father of a classmate of his was a great admirer of Byron when he was young.

In the photo, he had Byron-like fluffy curls, a shirt with a long collar, and silk sleeves.

He was also a very trendy literary youth back then.

When the war broke out.

While others carried army manuals and training documents, he always kept two poetry collections in the pocket on the chest of his dragoon lieutenant's uniform with a black lambskin collar.

One book contained his own poems. He paid for a bookseller to print 300 copies at his own expense and circulated them among a small circle of people.

The other is a selection of Byron's poems.

As if to say, "Byron? Did you see that? What you did, I did now, I rushed to the battlefield with poetry!"

And then he really died.

He died in the great battle against Tsarist Russia on the Eastern Front in 1916.

That winter, Tsarist Russia launched the Brusilov Offensive, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost more than 40 million troops, including 150 prisoners, in one winter.

He thought he was a lieutenant in the dragoons, a lord, riding his cherished steed to cheers, applause, and honor.

The war will be over in a month.

At that time,

He would return home with his medal and throw his collection of poems to the crowd singing "God Save Emperor Franz".

In fact, the war lasted for four years and three months.

The great empires fought each other for hegemony and territory, and the world was torn apart.

A full ten million people died in the war.

In the face of heavy artillery, machine guns, barbed wire and machine guns, the dragoon lieutenant died no more heroically or with more honor than the mud-covered soldier.

In the last letter sent to his father's friend, there was no longer the heroic spirit and high spirits he had before going to the battle.

Filled with confusion and fear of war.

But he died anyway.

Death is silent and no one remembers it.

He admired and envied Byron so much. Byron died in the Greek independence movement, while he died in an aggressive war that began with the invasion of Serbia.

Is there anything more darkly humorous than this?

Every unsuccessful artist thinks that he is the most unique swan.

They thought they could sing out unique tunes that would be sung and remembered again and again by future generations.

And in fact.

They are just an ordinary gray duck in the big pot of time that stews everything, and they are stewed thoroughly without knowing what is going on.

No one will remember they existed.

No one will remember their death.

even.

No one will remember their lives.

So what if it is a real swan? So what if you are a princess sealed in a swan?
She has a skin as white as ice and bones as white as jade, a graceful demeanor, great talent, and strong self-confidence.

But all it takes to destroy you is a bullet from a shotgun.

Does a bullet care whether it pierces the neck of a gray duck or a white swan?
Does the bullet care whether the swan whose neck it pierces is so confident and strong?
There have been too many shotguns in this world and too many people who can shoot.

Sometimes, those who fired the guns were the crazy times. Sometimes, it was family members who pulled the trigger in the name of "love you" and "for your own good".

Miss Elena's daily life is very busy.

Ever since Anna became the manager of the visual arts column of Oil Painting magazine.

Her daily schedule is very full.

Every week, I almost receive more than ten invitations from curators, organizing committees and sponsoring governments of various large and small biennials, art festivals, art fairs, and top solo exhibitions, inviting Miss Elena to serve as a judge.

I also wish I had twenty buyers' guides with a four-and-a-half-star recommendation rating, or that I needed to interview or write columns for famous artists on the Forbes Artists Rich List.

If you want to hold power, you are destined to never have a leisurely life.

With the size of Oil Painting magazine, she can send invitations to ordinary painters worth millions of dollars and coordinate a time to invite them to Austria for an interview, or simply interview them online.

But there are still some art exhibitions and some real masters.

Anna felt like running over to see it in person.

She is a person who likes to travel at a slow pace.

I prefer cars to trains, and I prefer trains to planes.

Miss Elena believes that the essence of a journey lies in the process rather than the result. If you don’t have time to walk through the streets and alleys and slowly appreciate the scenery passing by the window, then the meaning of traveling is lost.

But it took more than a month.

The mileage she has flown on her Dassault 2000EX private jet may be more than the total of the past three years.

I almost never spend a full week in a hangar anywhere.

Paris, Berlin, London.

Flying everywhere.

I wish I could use the relay network to make conference calls while on the plane.

However, these two days are an exception.

Miss Elena did not rush to deal with the magazine's business.

After several rounds of consultations, they reached a letter of intent with the Saxony state government in Germany.

The Saxony state government will permanently transfer the ownership of Marin Castle and the surrounding thousands of acres of idle forest land to the Elena family foundation.

At the same time, a low-interest loan of 3700 million euros was provided.

Irena's family promised that in the next 15 years, the land cannot be used for any commercial activities except for the construction of a family museum. In addition, she will also pay an additional investment of no less than 3700 million euros for the restoration of the castle and the renovation of surrounding supporting facilities.

The specific details also involve loans, mortgages, environmental assessments, construction, giving priority to hiring local Saskatchewan workers and construction companies... and a series of other minutiae.

It is expected that the earliest that some exhibition halls will be put into operation is the third quarter of 2024.

But the details have been finalized.

Miss Elena attended the signing ceremony with the Governor of Saskatchewan yesterday.

After the ceremony.

Anna did not return to Glitz immediately, but ran to Dresden, the capital of the neighboring state of Saxony.

As one of the largest landowners in Austria, Irena's family's real estate is spread all over Europe.

Germany has the largest number of them.

It is an old tradition that Austrians like to buy houses in the homes of their German cousins.

As early as on the eve of the collapse of the empire, because of the relatively relaxed policies, relatives and friends liked to form teams to go to Germany for money. Ole Krug's family was one of those who went there for money.

Dresden is the largest city in Saxony and one of the most historic and beautiful cities.

As early as the Middle Ages, it was a commercial hub and textile center between Eastern and Western Europe and the Mediterranean.

In terms of prosperity and fashionable clothing, it is definitely incomparable to Paris.

But it can also be regarded as the Little Paris of Central Europe.

When Grandma Karazu was a teenager, she often went to Berlin to attend social balls during the social season. She hated being bored, so she often came to Dresden to go shopping, boating, vacation, and paint.

At that time.

The family thought that their daughter just had a strange temper and that she would be fine after a few years.

The relationship did not develop into the incompatible point that it became later. I even bought her an apartment in the old town as a coming-of-age gift.

The other party spent two or three summers here after he became an adult.

later……

This apartment is basically abandoned and not often occupied.

The last time someone stayed here for a long time was when Anna’s father was a member of the European Parliament. He went on a business trip to Dresden to discuss matters related to the Textile Industry Federation. He cleaned up the place and lived here for a while, but that was around the turn of the millennium.

Anna signed the contract.

Looking at the Elena Family Art Museum which is about to break ground.

On a whim, she suddenly wanted to see the original source of all this.

She asked the housekeeper to help her clean up the apartment so that she could stay here instead of going back to Gliese at night.

"Has Grandma Kara ever stood by the window on a rainy night like me, looking at the swans with their necks drooping on the golden dome of Notre Dame Cathedral, and watching the raindrops dripping down...on the carriage shed of the Brown Coach (note) below?"

(Note: A type of horse-drawn carriage commonly used for rent in Europe in the late 19th century.)
Probably not.

If you have seen it, the swan sculpture in Kara's eyes and the swan sculpture in Anna's eyes may look the same, but they are definitely not the same one.

This is not Vienna or Paris, where a café may have a 200-year history.

Dresden was almost completely destroyed in the flames of World War II. It was said to be a hellish disaster scene. The famous writer von Gunner witnessed the situation at that time and wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five", questioning whether the war made the United States as crazy as Germany.

And after the war.

The city was reduced to ruins, with no more than ten buildings in the entire old city left standing undamaged.

The apartment building beneath her feet.

It's one of them.

Miss Elena turned her head and looked at the diary on the table and the remains of the burnt oil painting.

(End of this chapter)