Du Yongqiao, as an oil painter, once in the 1960’s influenced a number of young artists in the Southwest of China. Now, in the 1990’s, after keeping silence for years, he has held a succession of art exhibitions, shocking again a number of young artists who have just been baptized in the 1985 Trend. These young artists, viewing and emulating his fine paintings again and again, exclaim at the miraculous art of this old painter who is over sixty years. And the middle-aged ones, once the younger worshipers of him in the 1960’s, express their sincere praise and admiration when they examine his unique and perfect art. Mr. Du’s influence has even spread over to Taiwan, where his art is repeatedly introduced.

　　His major oil works are concerned about landscapes and still lives. This kind of art from the West commonly stresses the appreciation and representation of the beauties of nature itself. The Western painters adhere to the representation of the various light, color and formation in nature. And their passion is more satisfied from the representation. But as for Mr. Du, painting is more a medium to express the painter’s feeling, and what is most moving in a painting lies in its strong and overflowed lyricism.

　　Mr. Du was born in the countryside, where the nature was beautiful and peaceful, and his family’s living was hard so he worked a lot even as a child but meanwhile he learnt a lot of classical literature from his father. All of those have shaped his unique spirit. He loves the nature and loves all the fine images in the live, tasting all the interesting details around him. But his worldly live is full of frustrations, maybe because of his hardship in his childhood, or maybe because he forgets himself in his art so much that he always forgets the worldly wisdom and many people could not understand him. It is maybe because of his frustrations that he has put himself all into the art and the painting has almost become all the shelter of his hope. Mr. Du, unworldly but honest, is in his lifetime infatuated into his painting where he breathes out his pleasure and anger, sorrow and joy, only to sing his own songs with his own voice, which is very uncommon especially in the contemporary era full of utilitarianism. If his early works sing of the pastoral peaceful beauties of nature, his latest works concern more about a meaningful taste complex and hard to be explained. In his paintings, his personality and feeling dip so much into nature that the nature reflects the light of his spirit rather than the nature shows off its beauties to mankind. He paints the old street, the old house and the southern watery village in ancient style, always full of an attractive melancholy, a nostalgic feeling, a little chilly, sentimental, lonely, pacific and indifferent. In Going Home, how many memories of childhood are awaked by the lonely old wooden bridge, the silent pond and the warm fire in the stove! In the Old Propylaeum, and in My Home When I Was Small, how many sympathetic responses arise from the old buildings, the tender feelings between the mother and the baby, and from the little boy leaning against the door with his fantastic reveries! This kind of color with strong feelings overflows through almost all his works. We can touch his ubiquitous moving feeling whether from the cool beach After Rain, from the seascape in the Moonlight, or from the village path in the Mud, or from the tranquil pond of lotus in the Early Autumn, or from the girl Taking Exercise in front of the antique-flavored piano, or from the falling and fallen flowers in the Autumn Red. In the time when utilitarianism overruns as fashion, Mr. Du persists in selecting only his favorite subject matters, and it is his honest persistence that makes his art successful. This kind of feeling coming from his deepest mind is combined with Chinese classical taste, peaceful, indifferent, lonely, melancholy and even sentimental. His oil painting, therefore, is more close to the spiritual essence of the Chinese traditional art—the spirit to express one’s ideal from one’s feeling, the spirit of a pure Oriental image.

　　The basis of his oil painting is undoubtedly the skills of realistic painting as when he started to make oil painting in the 1950’s he followed the suit of the Russian and European painters. His ability to draw object forms is very strong. According to the strict standards of the Western Realism, his skills in watercolor or in oil painting are unquestionable and even enviable, for example in the Nude. When young, Mr. Du clung madly to the Western art of oil painting, especially to the French Impressionism and the Russian Peredvizhniki, and he studied and copied so lots of those masterpieces that he has known their styles and skills quite well. It was maybe because he was born to be supersensitive of color, or it was maybe because he, as a little boy, was influenced by constantly seeing the abstractive forms of the Chinese traditional and folk designs from the embroidery of his grandma and from the New Year pictures; he was unexpectedly not captured by the current fever that was interested in representation of the reality even when he just started to learn oil painting. By contrast, in control of the skills to paint realistically, he has toughly paid his eyes to the expressiveness of the painting forms themselves, for which he suffered a lot in the times when “formalism” was considered to be reactive politically. And his art, therefore, is more purified if we examine it today.

　　On talking art, Wang Guowei (1877—1927) thinks that the real object is “the first form of painting” and “the use of brush and ink belongs to the second form.” He appraises highly the second form, “all I appreciate in a painting is indeed the second form…all my criticism towards calligraphy and painting are about spirit, rhythm and taste, which are all concerned about the second form rather than the first one.” (Collection of Essays by Jing’an, II) Wang Guowei has emphasized the special and decisive aesthetics of the art itself. Comparatively, Clive Bell (1850-1942) in his Art claims his famous viewpoint of “the significant form”. If art, he thinks, only narrates or represents the reality to arouse the daily feeling and to convey the daily information, “it will never aesthetically touch us.” By contrast, he thinks “what touches off our aesthetic feeling could only be the relation or the form combined with lines and colours in their certain specific way,” i.e. “the significant form.” Certainly, a history of art is the one with aesthetics and forms opposite and complementary to each other, and the one of the development of forms under the control of aesthetics. The independent element of the forms is the one deciding the aesthetic value of an art. The art of painting also expresses the painter’s feeling, but it expresses in its own unique way, different from any other forms.

　　Mr. Du perhaps has not specially studied these theories, but as a talented painter and with his great intuition to art, he has a strong intention to the artistic forms. Even in the times when the realism was the only accepted one, he was not satisfied with the painting simply realistic, but contrarily he was thirst for the expression of his complex feeling to various colors, and furthermore, he always wanted to seek the unique pleasure in the movement of his brush. When he came across the paintings of Maximov, a Soviet Union painter, firstly in the 1950’s, Mr. Du as a young painter was immediately attracted by Maximov’s brief and abstractive forms, and thus started his unique study of oil painting, which showed his unusual sight of art. Although most of his works derive from the reality and they seem to belong to the realistic genre, in his eyes, a realistic painting can of course convey some certain content of feeling from its subject matter, but as to the art of painting, the forms are more important for they contain more of the painter’s self-cultivation, his aesthetics and his personality. The soul of his art lies in his unique forms that are reflected through his brush movement and through his coloring.

　　Mr. Du likes to use the powerful brushstrokes that have shaped the basic mood of his works. His strokes are full of strength, obvious, tough, bold, vigorous and straightforward. From his childhood, he has loved the Chinese traditional arts, especially loved the ink painting and calligraphy in which he is enchanted with the inexhaustible strokes and innumerable rhymes. This causes him not contented with the singularity of the square stroke in Western painting, but instead, since the beginning he has tried to use the Chinese complex strokes into his oil painting. It is the inexhaustible strokes from the Chinese traditional arts that have made his oil painting unique with his brilliant personality in the contemporary age.

　　In his paintings, we can enjoy the different changes of his strokes: big or small, wide or narrow, regular or irregular, rough or smooth, and the like. He has also used the inexhaustible strokes from Chinese painting into his painting: a slow or quick stroke, a twisted or turned stroke, a dry or wet stroke, a central or sided stoke and a pressed or unpressed stroke. The unique style of his painting consists of such endless strokes as the overlapping movement of the wet strokes and dry strokes (for example in the Old Street and in the Old Propylaeum ), heavy or light strokes, big blocked or small dotted strokes, so on and on. His oil works are fine and endure careful examination. You must appreciate his original works. In every part of them, you will find his ubiquitous craftsmanship. In the Mud, you see not only the lines of the trunk, of the dry branches and of the still lives, but also the Oriental calligraphic rhythms made up with a wave of three turns, with a broken stroke of a continuous intention. In the Deep Sleep, in the Drizzle, and in the Old Street in the Southern Town, you hear the symphony of his complex strokes, while in such small works as the Impression, the Sound of Waves, the Beach and the Moonlight, you hear the sonata of his pure strokes…Huang Binhong (1865—1955) got a penetrating instruction when he began to learn painting and he benefited all his lifetime from it: “Painting as calligraphic writing should be obvious in every stroke.” Mr. Du who likes Huang Binhong very much makes his brush movement as Mr. Huang did—his every stroke is clear. Although he paints on the base of real object, Mr. Du never let the object hinder him from using strokes, but he instead looks for the harmony between his strokes and the object. On this point, his tough ability to paint realistically often combines the two in satisfaction, for example in An American Girl, in An American Teacher, and in the Kneeling Nude. But brushstrokes—the substantial tracks of a painter’s subjective emotion—are more important for him. His brushstrokes could be really called obvious and clear; no matter how they are overlapped, every one can be examined and considerable. It is the unique adventure from the Chinese traditional brushes to the Western painting brushes that makes his oil painting full of implications—the outstanding characteristic of the Oriental art.

　　This spirit of the Oriental art, the aesthetics stressing the subjective feeling and ideal, causes his oil painting quite unusual in color. If his brushstrokes are outstanding because of the characteristics with the Oriental subjective spirit, his coloring is enriched in a new way from the pure and complex ink and from the super realistic expressiveness of ink. Mr. Du is so infatuated with color that he gets a lot of pleasure only from the expressiveness of coloring itself, which is hard to be commonly understood. He is one of a few innocent painters I have ever seen to curiously observe and taste the interesting world at any moment and to live all the time in an artistic atmosphere. He is not only infatuated with the colors in the boundless universe, but also fond of the creation of his own colorful world, a free world of art. With such a free disposition, he would never like to passively obey or imitate the nature, but rather he likes to gain inspiration from the colors in the nature and to advance, exaggerate or imagine this inspiration according to the ideal, taste and feeling of his own. No wonder, his works, between likeness and unlikeness, are full of a charm, poetic and dreamlike.

　　The coloring arrangement in his works is precise and exact. Although these coloring relations derive from reality, he exaggerates or abstracts them in his painting with his feeling. Once to treat details, he brings his brilliant expression of color to play incisively and vividly. While keeping the harmony among the bigger color blocks, he treats the parts—with his intuition and his adept skills—by contrasting cold color and warm color, by changing fanciful and plain, by conflicts of saturation, transparence, floridity, massiveness, and the like. As the result, the whole painting looks more substantial and is more worth seeing. In a dark part, the coloring not only is transparent with the subtle taste of cold and warm brush touches, but also stresses the hollow, or freely breathing arrangement that is like the arrangement of a Chinese traditional painting in which there are delicate changes of splashed, broken and massive ink only within one stroke. Such qualities can be seen especially in My Home When I Was Small and in the Melons Are Ripe. As about light coloring or even about white color, Mr. Du also shows his talent to make such coloring look saturated. He has partiality for the mellow grey because of his melancholy tendency. Those of his exquisite scenes do well out of the expressiveness of such grey coloring which is made up of a tendency of innumerable colors and opens out the magical function of the complementary color, sounded or implicit. For example, he sprinkles some bright and warm dotted blocks in a patch of cold grey (as in the Sound of Waves and the Drizzle), or he lies about a little blue-green in a patch of warm grey (as in the Market and the Autumn Moon). These coloring changes are specially fine and complex in his details. He knows very well the secret of coloring relation. This is not only because he has piled up abundant experience in coloring theories and in coloring command during his over-forty years of painting career, but also because he has advanced all of those into his excellent intuition of coloring. As the result, he is so able to take a rein on coloring at his pleasure like a magician that his every brush of coloring is worth tasting carefully for each of his brushstroke contains rich and splendid coloring with changes of cold and warm. His coloring, on one hand, represents the object just right, and on the other hand, independently embodies the lasting appeal of coloring itself. This extremely fine expression of coloring has surpassed the naturalist aesthetics that stresses the representation of reality.

　　There is another point worth mentioning to his works. By overlapping the coloring and brushstrokes, he produces a unique and abstractive taste in a part of a painting. Between likeness and unlikeness, or even between being and not being, you can feel a certain mystery beyond expression. These parts have an independent aesthetic value though to be seen separately. No wonder, many spectators use magnifying glass to examine them carefully, lingering on the coloring aesthetics and forgetting to return. And most preciously, the original craftsmanship of his treatment, without any intensive attention, is full of his free and natural brushstrokes.

　　When talking about the relationship between nature and painting, Dong Qichang (1555—1636) says, “If we consider the reality, any mountain or river is better than a painting; but if we consider the artistic ink, any painting is better than a real mountain or river.” Chinese painters are always fully confident of themselves in front of the nature. It is the painter’s feeling, will, ideal and taste expressed in his painting that make an art work surpass the real nature, isn’t it? Mr. Du, an outstanding painter who started his painting from the Western realist school, has become aware almost since the beginning and from his intuition as a Chinese that there are not any artistic expressions or any “significance” in a pure external object. If “significance” has not been put into the objective reality art will be lost, for the “significance” in a painting is the most important. It is in this point, a crucial one of the Oriental aesthetics which of course is able to communicate with the Western modern aesthetics, that Mr. Du has brought his oil painting into the system of the Oriental art soul. If this subjective significance is the soul of the Oriental art, his oil painting, full of his personality, his feeling, ideal and his individual interest, is worth being called the Oriental oil painting. Compared with many painters who practise the nationalization of oil painting, he does more implicitly, more substantially, more essentially, and of course more outstandingly.

 

August 1997

速写

速写