Almighty painter

Chapter 630 Carving Chrysanthemum
late at night.

A quiet study with a desk lamp.

The height of the chair was not suitable, so Gu Weijing simply stood beside the table and carefully carved the wood in front of him.

The light shines on the mirror-like metal blade, creating an ever-changing stream of light on the surface of the tea stool.

This was the first time that Gu Weijing actually tried to carve wood.

He has a pious heart.

Gu Weijing deliberately did not choose any complicated or showy knife techniques or combined patterns, but carved out the roots, stems, leaves, corollas, calyxes and receptacles bit by bit, stroke by stroke.

As a practice.

He planned to carve a flower on the surface of the tea stool.

Flower painting is the most common basic design element incorporated into carvings when creating heavy-color prints.

In his previous printmaking classes, the patterns he carved were mainly flowers, trees, and simple small animals.

The difference is that the shapes of the plants and flowers carved on the eraser are close to children's simple drawings.

For example, pine trees.

When I was learning printmaking before, its main structure was transformed into two large and small triangles stacked up on top of each other, plus a rectangular block at the bottom representing the roots of the tree.

That's the "kindergarten version" of the pine tree used in introductory cartoon drawing lessons.

The so-called roses and seasonal roses.

The carving method is relatively complicated, but it still involves the splicing of some basic geometric patterns.

We even want to make it easier for everyone to become familiar with intaglio, relief, engraving and relief.

When teachers teach carving, circular elements rarely appear.

All arcs are simplified into horizontal lines, diagonal lines and continuous short broken lines.

What Gu Weijing is carving now is a fully bloomed chrysanthemum.

The chrysanthemums are in full bloom with a profound meaning and graceful demeanor.

Among the many flower paintings under the traditional Chinese painting system.

It is the most difficult to paint orchids, and the brushwork for painting chrysanthemums is the most complicated.

Chrysanthemums are different from other flowers.

The difficulty of wisteria flowers lies in the fact that they bloom in large numbers and the appearance of small flowers hanging continuously like a waterfall.

When painting a picture of wisteria, one often has to pile up the curling vines, flowers and leaves on the painting.

As for the brushwork of drawing each flower, it is not difficult.

The vine is the bone and the flower is the flesh.

Wisteria flowers have only five petals, and can be completed in a moment with just a few strokes.

Once you become familiar with it, you can draw one in just one or two seconds.

Graceful and majestic like a peony.

Single-petaled peonies have a variable number of petals, with five to ten leaves per flower.

Double-petal types double.

But the leaves of peonies are large and full, and the flowers are not complicated.

For roses, which have fully double petals and more than thirty leaves, this is considered a very complex painting technique in traditional Chinese painting.

But chrysanthemums are much more than that.

The beauty of chrysanthemum is its "hundreds of petals rolled up, thousands of petals full".

Each chrysanthemum has hundreds of petals and leaves.

In botanical terms, the flowers and leaves of chrysanthemum can be tubular, tongue-shaped, or hydrangea-shaped, and it belongs to an indefinite inflorescence.

On the thousands of petals of chrysanthemums that people see on the branches, each petal is a separate small flower with a complete ecological structure.

A flower, a leaf.

Hundreds of small petals cluster together to form a large blooming chrysanthemum.

When making chrysanthemum tea, each chrysanthemum flower put in the cup is an "inflorescence" composed of countless small flowers, rather than just a single chrysanthemum.

and so.

When painting.

Each chrysanthemum flower is equivalent to painting a whole vine of wisteria flowers.

Without any draft, carving is time-consuming and laborious.

With dozens or even hundreds of petals piled up, normally your arms will become sore and weak after carving for a while.

Very error-prone.

"interesting."

Gu Weijing picked up a long strand of sawdust with the blade of the knife, raised his hand, looked at his hand, and then looked carefully at the carving knife in his hand.

Rubber wood is not a good wood with a hard texture, but it is the hardest root in the whole tree after all.

Sometimes, in the initial stage of printmaking, for most people, it doesn't matter whether it is good wood or bad wood, high density or low density.

As long as it is a log, it seems too difficult.

For convenience.

The master craftsman would give the apprentices particle boards made of three-ply plywood, five-ply plywood and wood chips, and let them practice on them first.

Even particle board has completely lost the original characteristics and structure of wood.

Wood is also wood.

It is much more difficult to carve than carving a carrot or an eraser.

However, there wasn't even a trace of sweat on the tip of Gu Weijing's nose.

He directly carved the part of wood that is generally recognized as the most difficult in the wood carving industry, and he carved it so easily and freely that it seemed a little disrespectful to the roots of the tree.

After all, I have worked hard for more than 20 years, right?

The roots of rubber wood are not necessarily easier to carve than the trunks of mahogany or oak.

But now it’s so easy.

Gu Weijing realized it.

This feeling comes partly from the carving knife in my hand.

The highest level of printmaking is to hold the knife as if it were a pen.

If you really paint with a brush, whether it is the brush used for Chinese painting, the soft brush used for watercolor or oil painting, or the tools commonly used by contemporary painters, there is no essential difference between them and the tools in the studio of Leonardo da Vinci's time hundreds of years ago, or even the brushes used by people in the Han Dynasty two thousand years ago.

There are slight changes in the shape.

There are some special brushes such as hazel pen and fan pen.

Besides.

The paintbrush is still the same paintbrush.

Nowadays, soft brushes made of nylon are more common.

From a painting perspective.

Whether in terms of elasticity, water absorption, pigment retention, or even the "elegance" of the brush, artists prefer to use natural hair materials such as old-school wolf hair, wool, pig bristles or mink hair.

On one point.

There is no difference between Eastern and Western painters.

If Wu Daozi or Turner were to travel into today's studio, they would certainly be surprised, but the overall feeling of painting would not change much.

Hundreds of years.

The improvements in drawing tools are minimal.

In fact, soft brush painting is a highly mature painting system and there is no room for change or improvement.

Sculpting is another matter.

The carving knives in Gu Weijing's hands are all of the most basic types. At most, they are not as perfunctory as the triangular knives made of a large piece of iron that the older generation of Grandpa Gu used to sharpen pencils when they were young.

But it is just an ordinary mainland product sold online for 6000 Myanmar Kyats a bunch.

But even this modern high-carbon alloy knife, which costs about the same as a few crayons and has a Rockwell hardness of HRC59, is better to use and more stable in cutting than the high-quality carving knives that Lu Zigang carefully selected and collected as treasures.

Tough but not soft.

Hard but not brittle.

The two carving knives are separated by a generation gap of three hundred years of civilization, and are also the crystallization of the wisdom of generations of smelting and steelmaking research since the world entered industrial civilization.

In general.

Three-tenths of the ease that Gu Weijing now feels when carving seals can be attributed to the tools in his hands, and the remaining... ninety-seven points are naturally due to the awesomeness of his legendary technique.

What a joke.

This contains all the experience of plane carving of a top master who never had children, never married, and only focused on carving all his life! In the Hong Kong martial arts novels that Lao Gu loves the most, it is equivalent to taking some magic pill, fairy peach fruit, or a sixty-year-old monk grabbing you, holding your head against your head, and forcing you to drink a half-century of skills.

“This engraving is really amazing.”

It’s one thing to have relevant information about a skill in your head.

Watching the exquisitely carved patterns gradually take shape in front of you is another thing entirely.

Gu Weijing’s biggest feeling now is simplicity.

Correct.

Just simple.

too easy.

Both are legendary techniques related to the "knife".

The feeling of using skills with a carving knife and an oil painting knife is very different.

Let me describe it in a more mysterious way.

The feeling that knife painting gives to Gu Weijing is that the "art" has been pushed and expanded to the extreme.

So it is extremely prosperous and extremely romantic.

What complex colors, what a psychedelic temperament.

He could use the painting knife in his hand to pick out and paint them out.

When he picked up the oil painting knife, he seemed to have turned into a South China Sea butterfly in "Records of Strange Things" written by a person from the Eastern Han Dynasty.

The South China Sea butterfly is a giant butterfly weighing up to eighty kilograms.

According to legend, it is a mirage, and when its wings are fully spread, they are as big as the triangular sail of a merchant ship at sea.

It flies lightly over the vast ocean that connects the sky to the earth. With just a slight vibration of its wings, it can create one crystal dream after another that will never be repeated.

While holding the carving knife.

And vice versa.

It is the restraint that results from the development of techniques to the extreme.

All the attention in life is focused on one point, and the entire world outside is collapsing inward in endless loneliness and endless concentration.

Finally it all turns into a golden mustard seed.

In mustard seeds.

It is the entire Sumeru in Lu Zigang’s life.

He did the simplest thing a thousand times, ten thousand times, a million times.

So you can stand on the top of the cliff and pour the oil from the spoon. The oil line will pass through the three thousand feet void and fall into a narrow-mouthed gourd containing copper coins.

Oil enters through the hole, but the money does not get wet.

Therefore, one can hold a knife and meet with the spirit rather than with the eyes, and use the thickness to penetrate into the space. One can cut a strong bull into pieces. The knife cuts through the fascia and bones, and produces a sound of elegant music that is as real as reality.

Carvings were his oil-cans, the bulls he butchered every day.

The old man pours the oil while the butcher cuts the beef.

"The art is close to the Tao!"

As the blade of Gu Weijing's carving knife slid smoothly across the surface of the wood, he sighed in his heart.

Considering that the early Warring States period when Pao Ding performed the butchering of an ox for King Hui of Liang was an era when bronze and iron tools were in transition.

Even on the battlefield, there are still many bronze swords.

It was not until the Han Dynasty that the mass production of iron tools completely surpassed that of bronze tools.

As a cook with a relatively low social status, Liang was not a country rich in iron ore like Qi and Han. If the story recorded in the chapter of "Zhuangzi: The Master of Health Preservation" had any real prototype.

Make a reasonable inference.

In the past, when the butcher chef was butchering the cattle, he must have been holding a heavy, blunt and non-wear-resistant copper knife in his hand.

Gu Weijing has one now.

The cook is still the same cook.

But it's the feeling when the butcher replaced the knife with an iron one.

No matter how you cut the knife, it is very different from drawing lines on paper with a brush, yet it has a similar "freehand pleasure".

To put it more bluntly.

The works created with a painting knife are just like the dishes cooked by the Chinese chef boy.

As soon as the lid is opened, light starts to come out, accompanied by rhythmic music.

That kind of beauty is the outward-looking light that can be seen everywhere.

The help and changes that "Zigang Carved Heart Sutra" brought to Gu Weijing were completely invisible and ubiquitous.

If you cut off a one or two centimeter section of the "knife touch" on the tea stool and compare it with the "knife touch" on the rubber stamp in the pencil case next to it.

The first reaction is probably that there is no essential difference between the two.

The triangular knife is tilted at a 45-degree angle to the engraving plane, and it is difficult to compare the simple lines carved by the cutting knife method.

If you have to say it.

The knife line of the former seems to be more "solid".

There wasn’t any uncontrolled shaking.

The depth of the knife marks is just right, the force is very steady, and the lines are incredibly smooth.

If we lengthen the knife marks on both and compare them.

The second reaction should be that all the engraved lines on the tea stool are carved by computer.

Because from beginning to end, no matter how long the line is.

Is it a straight line or a curve.

No matter how it bends, turns, or curves... all the knife lines remain absolutely even and stable, not like a work of human carving.

Only the more you look.

Only then can you discover the flavor of these lines.

It is as solid and stable as machine carving, yet without any of the almost inevitable sluggishness and dullness of machine carving.

The flowers have thousands of petals, each one is charming.

It blooms in full bloom, hanging down from the branches.

It is held high but not drooping, full and lively.

The chrysanthemum flavor is very strong.

When Gu Weijing cut, each stroke was a stroke.

The carving method of the knife is stable, yet flexible and changeable.

No matter whether it is sharp, round, wide, narrow, long, short, curved or straight, there is not a single stroke that can be found to have made any mistakes or omissions.

Even the moderate diffusion of the ink lines on the paper and the tip of the brush when it is lifted, perfectly highlight the charm of the rise and fall of the brush.

He seemed to use a knife as a pen and "wrote" on the tea stool instead of "carving" it.

Compared with the meticulous chrysanthemums drawn by Gu Weijing with brush and ink, it has a bit more of the freshness and naturalness of plants.

From ancient times to the present.

Even if lithographs and copperplate engravings are done using the knife-cut method, they are all intaglio engravings - a sunken groove is carved on a flat surface with a carving knife, and the surrounding borders are dipped in ink to serve as the base color.

After transferring to paper, the blank areas without paint are the "brush strokes" on the print.

In contrast to positive engraving, the brush strokes are retained as raised areas for inking and printing, while all other areas are carved away to create a relief effect and printed on paper, with the ink lines being the same as the brush lines.

The positive engraving is precise and sharp, while the negative engraving is soft and elegant.

I have never heard of anyone using the relief method when carving stone or copper plates.

That's not a carved board, that's pure tiredness.

Even if you want to retain simple and precise ink lines like relief engraving in the final work, you can only use the etching method, not the engraving method.

Wood is the only printmaking method that can be done in both positive and negative forms.

In general, positive engraving is more common.

tonight.

Since Gu Weijing wanted to experience his newly acquired legendary skills, he only focused on the carving itself. He didn't plan to pour some ink to paint the tea mat and find a place to cover it to make a complete print.

Although my level of collection appreciation is not very high, it is my grandfather's treasure after all, so I won't smudge it.

To save time.

Gu Weijing also directly used the intaglio method.

(End of this chapter)