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【英文资讯】A Painter Who Paints with his Soul

2013-05-24 14:19:47 来源:艺术家提供作者:Shui Tianzhong
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  In 1951, a poor boy from an impoverished family in the countryside of Yuechi County, Sichuan Province entered Chengdu Art College. The memories of his childhood were filled with loneliness and hunger, but his wonderful imagination was stimulated when he looked through the piles of pictures and books in the attic of his home. At a young age, he became obsessed with the paintings of mountains, stones, flowers and birds of his drawing teacher in the middle school. Two year after his entry, the Painting Department of Chengdu Art College was united into the Southwest Fine Arts College, the former Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Over many years, he experienced hard times there, while enjoying the birth and development of his art. This man was a none other than Du Yongqiao - an outstanding painter as well as an idol in the eyes of many of his students.

  His life before the Cultural Revolution (1966—1976) could be described from two points of view. On one hand, he had suffered discrimination and oppression as a typical so-called “a good professional worker without an interest in politics” and bearing the hardships in life as an introversive teacher, ignorant of worldly affairs. On the other hand, however, his long struggle to achieve perfection in art had won him outstanding achievements as well as a good reputation. The sharp contrast between these two sides, was typical of the fate among all the honest and righteous artists at that time.

  From the end of the 1950s to the termination of the Cultural Revolution, Du Yongqiao was subjected to tremendous suppression due to the malign political environment and his terrible economic situation. As a consequence his health was gravely damaged and he developed some serious lifelong diseases. Without money for the basic nutrition to sustain his life, Du Yongqiao was on the verge of selling off his last decent family belongings - a painting box he had kept for years. At that time, he couldn’t afford any painting materials. A piece of decent canvas would inject a dose of long-lasting joy into him. For nearly two decades, he and his family of three, lived in a small, dark and wet house covering only a dozen square meters. Here he contrived to produce his painting. Despite these difficult circumstances, Du Yongqiao, a mild and introvert yet persistent painter, acquired the unique skill of mastering color!

  Fate struck him two blows: first - the expropriation of all his paintings at the initial stages of the Cultural Revolution and second - two divorces—one in his youth and the other in his prime of life. In 1966, all the paintings he had accumulated for years were confiscated overnight in the name of being “a representative of old thoughts, old customs, old habits, and old traditions” and “reactionary”. This made the heartbroken Du Yongqiao almost commit suicide as he treasured his paintings as much as his life. Over the decades since then, he still recalled the loss of those irretrievable works – the fruit of his painstaking efforts. But for this irretrievable loss, there would have been more of his excellent works to hand down.

  Nevertheless, despite the miseries in life, Mr. Du gained prestige as someone with artistic talent and abundant creativeness. Aware that his ignorance and lack of interest in politics would stop him from the further study in the Максимов.K.M oil painting workshop, Du worked much harder than his peers and this effort yielded outstanding results. Even though he was counted as a typical so-called “a good professional worker without an interest in politics”, a thunderous applause burst out in the conference room on the day of work distribution in 1956 when it was announced that he would work at the College as a teacher. He became a teacher that all the students admired considerably and a teacher whose graceful art style and pious attitude towards art inspired students for a life-long period. During the Cultural Revolution, all the political posters he was appointed to paint were quickly cut out and taken away once they were put up. This couldn’t be stopped in spite of being repeatedly investigated and prohibited as “anti-revolutionary events” by the Workers’ Propaganda Team. Even though only slightly interested in propaganda posters, Du Yongqiao still painted the posters in his instinctive pursuit of the expressive effect of the color and brushwork.

  The situation of Du Yongqiao started to improve after the Cultural Revolution, but he was so incapable of adapting to the new environment that he never seemed to be excited about the changing waves of art and the corresponding market. I don’t know whether or not he had such an idea as “A gentleman would prefer being aloof to keep his own identity rather than become rich by engaging in vulgar commerce.” Then in 1989, he left the downtown area to live a reclusive life on the top of the cheerless and desolated Nanshan Mountain on the southern bank of the Yangtze River, with the aim of continuing his thinking on art and to practice painting without interruption. Earlier in 1979, he was converted to Buddhism, and now he began to piously learn Buddhist scriptures from master monks and nuns, which, as his later development revealed, was not an impulsive act, but a sign of his growing beliefs in religious ideals.

 

  Mr. Du, well known for his oil paintings, was actually involved in many areas of painting in his fledgling years. When he was a teenager, Du Yongqiao had a self-directed study on traditional Chinese painting. After his entry into Chengdu Art College, he studied sketches, watercolor, oil paintings and engraving paintings. This wide range of artistic art endowed him with much freedom in art creation. A largest portion of his oil paintings are landscapes, but he also painted still lifes, figures and human bodies.

  Du’s landscape paintings can be divided into two categories: one is about the mountain and the open field and the other about the relatively closed old street and deserted lanes. Works of the first kind are characterized by their tone of silent meditation – as exemplified by Autumn Pond (1955), Path in the Wood (1979), Moonlight (1995), Going Home (1997) and Nightfall (2001). Scenes of nature are always the basis of such works, but his personal understanding of nature imbues them with his emotions – in fact emotions permeate all his work. An idea among many people is that Mr. Du’s style is closely linked to the Russian style. The consensus is that the styles are similar in terms of the layout as well as the grey tone, a tone admired and obsessed by many Chinese oil painters. This similarity is found in such works as Going Home (1997) and Mud (1997). A more important similarity lies in the way of expressing feelings and emotions. Du’s paintings express feelings in the same way as the poetic Russian landscape paintings of the 19th Century. It should be admitted that Chinese oil painting in the recent century lack a strong poetic taste, so the paintings of Du Yongqiao are a successful paradigm of learning from exotic art.

  The most note-worthy part of Du’s oil paintings are the works about old streets and deserted lanes, in which his painting form, his personality and temperament and his state of mind shaped by various experiences are mutually echoed and merged. Even his works from his fledgling years, taking River Bank (1956) and Old Chengdu (1957), were first class in his time for their exact colors and intelligent brushwork. In his works, from Street Entrance (1983) and Old Street in the Southern Town (1984) in 1980s to My Childhood Home (1996), Serene Lane (1997) and The Series of Old Town: Pattering Rain (2001) in the 1990s, we can find that the painter was looking back with deep affection on the passing time, and the works are representative of the expression of one’s individual feelings through painting. If the focus of those works is on the poetic description of the feelings towards the passing old streets and lanes, The Series of Old Town created later was to explore the very edges of the expressive form of the painting language through the depictions of old streets and lanes. The work allows us to experience the gentle humanity in the old, dark, wet and broken environment and also to appreciate his quick and free brushwork and his intelligence in dealing with delicate colors. Du Yongqiao described an ideal painting in his mind as “the painting as a whole is precise and orderly, but its expressive form is unrestrained…The brush-using method should break the regular pattern and every stroke should be as free as possible… The strokes should be interwoven and overlapping so that they can make a mysterious impression. In part, those strokes, connected with all the delicate yet varied colors, can create an abstract effect.” The series of works produced in his later period demonstrate just how close he was to this ideal.

  What his paintings of portraits, human bodies and other things involving figures have in common is: the person and the environment are in complete harmony, giving the impression that the painter does not deliberately choose a corresponding environment or background to depict a person, but naturally paints the person while drawing the environment. This harmony is fully shown in such works as Rest (1967), Lovely Sunshine (1995) and My Childhood Home (1996). In these works, the painter not only properly blends the person with the environment into a whole structure, but also makes the person appropriately fill the canvas with colors and lines. The seemingly randomly painted person is in fact the very essence of the painting that holds the distinct meaning of the work. Different from common paintings of portraits and human bodies, persons in such works as Girl in the Sunshine (1991), Summer Day (1992) and Fresh Air (1996) look extraordinarily energetic and lively in the reflection of light or water, whilst in some paintings of human bodies, such as Naked Woman (1986) and Sleeping in Spring (2006), the painter successfully expresses the lives of young women with exquisite touches and delicate hues instead of his conventional brushwork. The same mood also appears in his works about children (like Sound Sleep painted in 1996), in which his simple and easy touches contain his boundless tender feelings.

  It is notable how much Du Yongqiao experiments in various works, where he gives full play to the variation in color, brushwork, texture and other elements of expressive forms. In his works of still life, for example, his interest in bright colors and his experiments in overlapping all kinds of points, lines and pieces has revealed a new Du Yongqiao. The sharp contrast between the cheerfulness and wildness mirrored in those works and the tranquility and gloominess in his works of the rainy old streets reflects the rich mind and personality of the painter.

  Undoubtedly, it was a lifelong pursuit of Du Yongqiao to study and explore the form of painting language. Against the backdrop of the mainstream of studying the fine arts of the Soviet Union in the 1950s, Du Yongqiao strode forward to “painting for the sake of painting.” He broke through the limits of the subject, the thinking pattern and the ideology with his extraordinary talent for art and also incorporated the cultural lyricism and form. However, after the Cultural Revolution, some of his works acknowledged by the mainstream media and housed by China National Museum of Fine Arts were, in his eyes, devoid of expressiveness of the painting language. “Those paintings cannot represent my painting style while those that really can are not likely to be taken seriously …” he once said. From the 1950s to the early new century, with a freer style of art expression, he was devoted to combining the forms of realism and the light in impressionism with brushwork and touches of traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting. Consequently, he shaped his own unique expressive style of a rich painting language and distinctive individual characteristic. Since the start of the new century, he developed the painting expressiveness to its fullest. Either the old streets or the villages in his paintings appear natural and free at an unprecedented level. The object, color and light are all generalized into an abstract impression, so that the tension of the overall form stands out. More importantly, his paintings feature a successful combination of the brushwork deriving from the traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting and the color and form of western painting. This perfect combination contributes to a style as free as a bird and a pencraft language full of feelings. This brushwork technique is not only the salient difference between Du Yongqiao in his early and middle period and Russian painters, but also his outstanding contribution to Chinese oil painting.

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