Almighty painter

Chapter 761 Gu Weijing's Impressionism

Tonks felt that what he was holding in his hands was not only a painting, but also a handful of sunshine, a puddle of rain and a thick fog.

Impressionism is a painting method that emphasizes "blur".

Take many works of Monet and Renoir as examples. The characters and landscapes in their paintings are often hidden in the sunlight and air by a large number of fine brushstrokes.

The facial features of the characters, the details and shadows of the scenery are half hidden and hazy.

therefore.

When Impressionism first emerged, some collectors believed that this was a painting style that did not pursue artistic techniques. Even decades before the birth of Impressionism, when Turner became famous and shifted his painting style to depicting "mottled light and shadow", and his works began to have some style and temperament similar to those of later Impressionist painters, some art critics claimed that this was an overly "blurry" painting method.

William Turner, who had become the most accomplished color master in Britain at that time and could be considered the 19th-century successor of the Venetian School of Painting, which had a long history and produced dozens of famous artists such as Titian, Giorgione, Tintoretto, etc., responded with a smile to such accusations.

"Hmm, blurry? Well said, this is exactly what I am best at after years of painting."

Tonks interpreted it from the perspective of a professional curator. Rather than saying that Impressionism is a painting style that emphasizes mottled and blurred images, it would be more accurate to say that Impressionism is a painting style that emphasizes a sense of atmosphere.

The impressionist temperament is even a little bit similar to that of Detective Cat, the invited illustrator participating in this year's Lion City Biennale, and her knife painting has a very personal style.

Both are more concerned with capturing a precise atmosphere than pursuing precise details.

Both are painting techniques that use thick painting more often than thin painting.

Knife painting is a type of painting that seems to have no technical threshold to get started, but if you want to reach a high level, it will test the painter's painting skills extremely.

The same is true of Impressionism.

Red, white, yellow, blue, colorful thick paints are blended into one between the vertical and horizontal fibers of the canvas by the artist's brush or painting knife.

If the tune is poor, it will be chaotic.

The various colors conflict and squeeze each other.

The difference in tone is called "blur".

If things are well reconciled, there will be order in the chaos.

The brushstrokes and knife strokes are stacked and arranged in an orderly manner, forming a large net that encompasses the picture.

A good adjustment can create "atmosphere".

Excellent Impressionist painters often have a talent——

They are able to abstract and conceptualize hazy landscapes.

They took the moon from the moon, extracted the torrent from the torrent, and moved the peaks from between the towering peaks. Then they abstracted and conceptualized the countless people in the world, extracting the success of the successful, the frustration of the frustrated, and the excitement of the cheerful faces...

Mix all of this together completely, add a drop of mystery, a transcendent experience similar to that in a religious sense, a soul interpretation full of personal subjective temperament, use a paintbrush as a stirring rod to mix it evenly, and finally transform all these conceptualized elements into tangible colors and scenery on the canvas.

It doesn't sound like painting, but more like an alchemical experiment that uses strange materials and mysterious rituals to create a "philosopher's stone" and sublimate life from solidified materials.

The artist's shift from realism to freehand painting carries with it a transcendental quality that moves from the real world to the philosophical and spiritual world.

Therefore, painters who are good at Impressionist painting and who can reach the top in the field of abstract freehand painting often have to have better painting skills than others.

If one cannot even clearly paint what a bright moon, a rapids or a mountain are, and cannot capture or interpret the subtle emotions on a person's face with a brush, then how can one capture the moon from within the moon or move a mountain from among the mountains?

If one blindly tries to mix them together vaguely, what is painted on the canvas will no longer be a precise atmosphere, but a vague paleness.

Curator Tonks calls this triple transformation of “substance – haziness – substance” the alchemy of art.

If we use the Eastern-style Zen meditation experience of Zen Master Qingyuan Xingsi of the Tang Dynasty as a reference, it should be roughly a philosophical understanding from seeing the mountain as a mountain, to seeing the mountain as not a mountain, and finally returning to seeing the mountain as still a mountain.

Monet experienced the death of his father, the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, the failure of his works to be auctioned off, and his wife Camille's illness and subsequent death. He only achieved artistic success after overcoming all these hardships in life.

As Van Gogh continued to torture himself and suffer from mental illness, his brushstrokes on the canvas became more and more passionate, and finally it seemed that he was not painting with a brush, but rather with the damp soil of the countryside.

Turner was a painter whose life was very smooth. He was just the son of a barber and his mother died of mental disorder. He seemed to be a template for a painter who followed the "tragic" path.

But he had a teacher who was the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and he was also good at building personal connections. Before he was 26 years old, he became the youngest academician in the history of the Royal Academy of Arts. He had money, status, fame, and he moved in and out of high society in a private carriage.

but.

The successful Turner and the unfortunate Van Gogh, are both artists who follow the "belief flow".

Some scholars would criticize that some of Picasso's works clearly look like a batch of perfunctory works produced in a hurry to sell to painting supply merchants when he was short of money. Turner is very different. He is a rare painter who has almost never painted any perfunctory works throughout his life.

William Turner was born on April 1775, 4.

William Shakespeare was born on April 1564, 4.

That's right.

There is no doubt that William is the most famous and important writer in the history of British literature and art, and there is no doubt that William is the most famous and important artist in the history of British literature and art. They are both named William and were born on the same day.

This is no coincidence.

At least Turner didn't think it was a coincidence.

Throughout his life, Turner had a temperament of "What is money? Money is a bastard. I was born into this world with a specific destiny." He felt that his birthday was the same as Shakespeare's, which meant that God had sent him down to make Britain Great Again!
After becoming famous, Turner would accept small commissions that were only a quarter or even a fifth of the market price of great painters of his level, regardless of his own "worth", as long as he was interested and found the task interesting. Turner was even willing to "lower his status" to accept illustration works from some publishing companies.

For Turner, the most important task in life was to make a breakthrough in painting style and to explore a new artistic path.

However, it was only after Turner's painting techniques matured and his life experience gradually matured that his "pre-Impressionist" watercolor and oil painting style gradually took shape.

Impressionism does not necessarily require a person to have a deep hatred and a deep hatred, and to have been repeatedly beaten by life in order to paint well, but a good impressionist painter must have the necessary life experience. If you understand impressionism as just a way of using the brush, then it doesn't matter how you paint.

If we understand Impressionism as a kind of "philosophical thought".

Well, just like most "philosophical thoughts" in the world, if you want to study it in depth, you have to experience life over and over again.

This is also the reason why Tonks was not very optimistic about Gu Weijing's impressionist works before seeing his works on the mobile phone screen.

His technique may be ready.

Is his mind ready?
His brush may be ready.

Is his "heart" ready again?
Young people like him who have many art resources to exchange, young people like him, Katsuko Sakai and even Cui Xiaoming who are less than 20 years old or in their twenties and can participate in the master exhibitions of international art biennials, do they know what it is like to stand in the sun for fifty hours with no one paying attention to them?

For young artists who can set foot here at the age of 18, it may be far more difficult to fully experience it spiritually than to make sufficient preparations in terms of techniques.

It's much more difficult.

Even someone as great as Picasso, who won the gold medal at the Spanish National Touring Exhibition at the age of sixteen, or Turner, who became a full member of the Royal Society of Arts at the age of twenty-six, took them at least twenty years to elevate art to the level of philosophy.

of course.

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Just like the difference between Gu Weijing's "Good Luck Orphanage in the Sun" and Cui Xiaoming's "New Three Bodies of Buddha".

There is definitely a difference in difficulty between taking a step forward in the chaotic darkness and embarking on a new artistic path and climbing step by step following the climbing ropes left by predecessors on the top of the mountain.

Even so.

Tonks once felt that at her age, it was still too early and immature to talk about understanding life.

The painting in his hand at this moment was Gu Weijing's resounding answer to his doubts.

Perhaps, the "voice" of this painting sounded louder to Tonks than Gu Weijing's words on the balcony just now: "Art should be more glorious than glory, art should be greater than greatness" or "I don't know how many standard processes there are in painting a picture, but I know that each of them is completely related to art."
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The screen of the mobile phone is not big, just a small square. The brush strokes on the screen seem to have traces of sketching, similar to the feeling of rushing to write in order to complete a specified work within a specified time - as if the thick fog only had time to spread halfway across the picture, and the sunlight only had time to break through a wisp of the thick fog on the picture.

The whole work is almost finished, but it is not finished yet.

But it doesn't matter.

This perfect rush also freezes time just right.

It almost eternally freezes the first ray of light that penetrates the curtains and shines into the background studio between the interlaced strokes of light and darkness, bringing with it a unique, silky temperament and blending out an extremely restored natural light and color.

The fine brushstrokes fall on the canvas like rain, creating an artistic visual moment.

Whether it is the rising of the sun, the fading of darkness, or the fading of light and the coming of night, it is all a moment.

The painter cleverly captured it and endowed it with the hustle and bustle of the human world.
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A very small moment can carry a very big theme, and a very short moment can determine a very long eternity. Capture it, understand it, and you will capture the connotation and essence of things. No matter how brilliant a photographic work is, or how sophisticated its technology is, if it is far from love, far from understanding of human beings, and far from the cognition of human destiny, then it is definitely not a successful work.

——Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of modern photojournalism, “The Decisive Moment”
-
In the colorful picture, a man sits in an armchair, with his chin slightly raised and his head tilted to look in the direction where the light comes from.

Tonks stopped in the doorway of the bathroom.

There is something alluring about the images on the screen.

It seemed to contain a magic spell that could manipulate the human mind, controlling him, forcing him, using the frozen moment on the canvas, using the light and darkness that were polar opposites yet inseparable, using the silent noise and roaring silence that were polar opposites yet inseparable. It ordered the curator to stop.

He stood still subconsciously, as if the person he was looking at through the screen at Tonks was not the man in the armchair, but Medusa with dancing green snakes as hair.

Tonks stood still.

A few seconds passed.

He slowly stretched out his arms, extended his left arm holding the phone forward, slightly above his jaw line, turned his face to the side, and raised his chin slightly, adjusting his posture so that his side face was facing the phone screen.

A lady walked out of the banquet hall, crossed the corridor, and came here to go to the bathroom, and happened to see this strange scene.

The female companion brought by the organizing committee guest was immediately shocked by the British uncle's domineering aura.

She recognized the curator Mika Tonks... Was she going to the toilet and also wanted to take a selfie and check in to leave a mark?
"Don, Don, Mr. Tonks, are you okay?"

The woman noticed that Tonks's face was too red, her eyebrows were slightly raised, and the corners of her mouth were subconsciously slightly opened, revealing between eight and sixteen teeth. Her expression was slightly distorted, and it was hard to tell whether it was pleasure or pain, so she asked worriedly.

Tonks ignored it.

He may not even have noticed whether the visitor was a man or a woman, and thought that he was being called because he was blocking the passage to the restroom.

Tonks stared at the screen. The face of the man in the armchair was hidden in the boundary between darkness and light. His expression was gloomy and uncertain, but seemed to have deep meaning.

He realized that this was a very impressionistic way of painting.

The painter hides the clear face of the character in the light and air, leaving only a rhythm suspended outside, using a non-realistic way to restore the character's emotions.

So he also kept his upper body in a similar posture to the man in the armchair in the picture, staring at him and guessing what he was thinking.

"Feel sorry."

He muttered something casually.

Then, maintaining this posture, he raised his left arm high, moved his feet sideways, and left the bathroom in a strange posture like a stiff neck.

"Wow."

The woman watched Tonks disappear into the depths of the corridor like a freak, and felt that she had a completely new understanding of British gentlemen from then on.

(End of this chapter)