In 1951, a poor boy from a declined literary family, 17 years old, born in the countryside of Yuechi County, Sichuan, in memory of his lonely and hungry childhood, full of his wonderful imagination produced in his childhood when he looked at the piles of the picture books at the attic of his home, absorbed in the mountains, stones, flowers and birds in the paintings of his drawing teacher in middle school, entered Chengdu Art School. Two years later, the art school was united into Southwestern Fine Art School, the former Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Since then for dozens of years, he had experienced his hard times in the institute while receiving the baptism of art. He was Du Yongqiao, an outstanding painter, an idol in the eyes of his many students.

　　His life before the Cultural Revolution (1966—1976) may be described from two sides. As a type of so-called “a good professional worker without caring for politics”, he was discriminated and oppressed. As an introversive pedant, he knew nothing about the society so that he must bear the embarrassments from his environment. On the other hand, he had for a long time struggled for the perfect art and thus won his great achievement with a good reputation. The big contrast between the two sides was in fact a miniature of the common lives of all the honest artists in that time.

　　During the time, he felt very oppressed because of his bad political environment and his terrible economic condition so that his health was awfully destroyed and he got a heavy disease for life. His painting box followed him for years. It was a treasure in his eyes. He almost sold it off as his last family belongings only because he had no money to buy the basic nutriment. Even a piece of decent canvas would bring him an unexpected joy since he could not buy the materials to paint. For nearly two decades, he and his family members, three in all, lived in a small house, dark and wet, with only a dozen of square meters, in which he also painted. It was in this case he acquired a unique skill to command colors in the dark. How persistent he was!

　　He had got many blows from destiny. Two divorces happened in his life, one in his thirties and another in his forties, but the heaviest blow was no more than his paintings being looted in the first period of the Cultural Revolution. In 1966, all his paintings were confiscated, which made him almost commit suicide because he loved his painting just as his life. For the long decades in his rest life, he had been thinking over those irretrievable works with his painstaking efforts. There might have been more of his excellent works if there were no such a confiscation.

　　On the other hand, what followed his hard life was his higher reputation led by his artistic talent and his abundant creation, which of the two formed a big contrast. He knew clearly that he, not like some others, had no chances to be selected to advance his study in USSR so that he worked much harder than the others and got an outstanding grade. Even though he was regarded as a type of so-called “a good professional worker without caring for politics”, there burst out a long and warm-hearted applause from the meeting room of the employment distribution in 1956 when he was announced to remain at the school as a teacher. Since then, he instructed innumerable students, who admired him greatly and were all convinced by his graceful style and his religious attitude toward art. During the time of the Cultural Revolution, he was appointed to paint picture posters for propaganda. Once his posters were publicized, they were always cut off and taken away. Such things were investigated as antirevolutionary events by the Workers’ Propaganda Team, but they could not be stopped even though they were prohibited again and again. Mr. Du Yongqiao himself was not interested in any picture poster, but he could be with his instinct in pursuit of its colors and its brush strokes if he was forced to do.

　　After the Cultural Revolution, his condition became better and better, but he was so limited to adapt the new environment that he seemed never moved by the changeable waves of art tide and art market. I cannot guess whether or not he had such an idea as “A gentleman would prefer being aloof to keep his real ego to being rich or honorable by dragging out his vulgar existence.” But actually in 1989, he firmly left the downtown area for the lonely Nanshan Mountain, Chongqing, beginning his recluse life in order to continue his thinking and painting without interruption. Earlier in 1979 he converted to Buddhism, and now he began to learn Buddhist teachings from master monks and nuns. From his later development, this was not a sudden whim, but a religious transition from the world life.

　　Mr. Du is known for his oil paintings, but few people know he began to learn not from this. In his earlier years he read a lot of books; since his teenage period he learnt to practice Chinese traditional painting; and after entering Chengdu Art School he learnt very well on line drawing, watercolor, print and the others. All of these made him do his art creation freely. His oil works include nudes, figures, still lives and landscapes.

　　His landscape paintings may, according to subject matter, be divided into two kinds: one is about open mountain and field; another is about closed old street. The first kind is full of silent meditation. Such examples are as Autumn Pond (1955), Path in the Wood (1979), Moonlight (1995), Going Home (1997) and Nightfall (2001). The natural scenes are always his supports in this kind, but his own understanding of the scenes are more and more until his mood soaks into everything. Many critics have mentioned the relationship between Mr. Du and the Russian painting. Generally speaking, apart from his composition similar to the Russian one and from the gray tune that Chinese oil painters admire very much, it is his individual mood that more continues the mode of feeling expression in the Russian painting. His mood always brings our mind to the Russian landscapes full of poetic flavor in the 19th century. It should be admitted that there is a lack of deep poetic flavor in the Chinese oil painting of the recent century. It is in this point that the kind of his landscapes is a successful practice in using foreign arts for our reference.

　　Another kind of his landscapes is about old streets and broken lanes. These landscapes are the most worthy of noticing. In the works, his outstanding characters in painting form, his complicated experiences and his personalities are represented appropriately. Even in his earlier works of this kind, taking River Side (1955) and Old Chengdu (1957) for examples, his exact colors and intelligent strokes are of the first class among his contemporaries. In his works from 1980s to 2000s—Street Mouth (1983), Old Street in the Southern Town (1984), My Home When I Was Small (1996), Quiet Lane (1997) and The Series of Old Town: Whistling Rain (2001)—we see that the painter is looking with his deep affection back on the passing time, and that such an individual mood through the art painting has become a typical one. If the center of his feelings in those works lies in the poetic expression of the passing old streets, The Series of Old Town created in his later years has reached the borderline of the painting language used to describe them. From the series, we may realize his briefly free strokes and his thickly rich colors as well as the humanity warmth in the old, dark, wet and broken environment. When the painter talks about his art idealism, he says that his anticipating effect of a painting is “a precise order in general and an unrestrained expression…to break the regular pattern to use brush, to paint as freely as possible…to overlap the brush touches to produce a mysterious impression while to make an abstract taste in a certain part by combining the overlapped touches with rich colors.” The Series of Old Town has carried out the idealism of his painting.

　　His figure, nude paintings share a common point: persons and their environments are as well blended as milk and water. They always give us an impression that the painter naturally paints the persons in their environments that he paints in the same time. He does not set up the background or environment only in order to painter a certain person. Calm (1967), Lovely Sunshine (1995) and My Home When I Was Small (1996) express the point very well. In these works, the painter not only properly blends the persons with their environments, but also properly makes the persons to replenish the paintings with colors lines. Those persons seemly pick up at random are in fact the touches full of lives, just like key words in a poem, bring a unique meaning into the works. In some figure paintings as Girl in the Sunshine (1991), Summer Day (1992) and Fresh Air (1996), persons look extraordinarily energetic in light or in vapor. In some nude paintings as Naked Woman (1986) and Sleeping in Spring (2006), the painter uses exquisite touches and delicate hues instead of his normal free strokes, and thus successfully expresses the lives of young women. The same mood also appears in his works upon children (for example Sound Sleep painted in 1996), in which his frank and easy touches contain his boundless tender feelings.

　　What runs through all his periods and all his subject matters is the full development of his colors, brushworks and textures, which let us realize his feelers into multiple-side experiments. In his still life works, for example, his interest in brightly plump colors and his experiments in all kinds of points, lines and pieces absolutely let us see another painter. These works often represent cheerfulness and wildness. They shape a strong contrast to the tranquil and gloomy style in his works of the rainy old streets, and such a strong contrast reflects his rich mind and personality.

　　It can be said that Mr. Du had for his life been in pursuit of painting language. In the 1950s when the fashion was learning from the fine arts of USSR, he strode with his excellent gift over the limit of their subject matters and of their ideology. He just absorbed their humanity colors and their poetic forms, and furthered them step by step to the painting purification. After the Cultural Revolution, some of his works were accepted by the main media and were housed in the National Art Museum of China. But in his eyes, those works were not expressive in the painting language. “Those paintings can not represent my style while the ones with my real characteristics can not be accepted…” he once said. From the 1950s to the 2000s, he devoted himself so much to the painting language that he shaped his own unique style, that he combined the realist forms, the impressionist lights and colors with the Chinese traditional touches and rhythms while expressing his art more and more free. After the year of 2000, he pushed the painting expressiveness to an extreme. Either his old streets or his water villages look natural and free; their forms, colors and lights are brought into a general abstract so that the tension in the whole form stands out. Importantly, his works are combined the Chinese traditional stokes with the Western colors and forms, which may be described as “using brush freely always with feelings in it.” This is not only the difference between the early-middle-period Du Yongqiao and the Russian painters, but also his outstanding contribution to the oil painting of China.

　　The pattern of the oil painting of China from 1950s is set up by several generations of painters with different background. These generations share a common advantage that they are close to the real life and try to realize their former generations’ ideal to localize the Western painting. But their disadvantage is the specialization of their oil painting. During a long period in art schools student painters were not encouraged to think nor taught to test how the painting craft became art, which caused the mainstreamed painting in the mid-1950s to always simply illustrate the subject matters and thus to lack lasting appeal. In addition, the one-side explanation of the Realism and the rigid division of specialty made the painters have a narrower mind and a lower sight, if compared to their former generations. It was such an environment that objectively made them look narrow-minded in their painting. But differently, Mr. Du, from the very beginning of his painting, addressed himself to the nature of oil painting and to the above mentioned humanity colors and poetic forms, for which he was excellent.

　　It is the ideal of many Chinese painters to combine the freehand brushwork in traditional Chinese painting with the Western painting that is good at expression of light, color and space. In this aspect, Chen Beixin (谌北新, 1932—) and Du Yongqiao are remarkable. The two with the same pursue have their own unique points: Mr. Chen is impressive in the combination of his color with his painting structure while Mr. Du uses his expressive color and brushwork to pass his implicit and melancholy mood. This subtle distinction reflects that Mr. Du combines his craft with his soul so he is worthy of the title—a painter to paint with his soul. He is outstanding not only among the painters in his generation, but also among those of modern China. After all, painting should contain the painter’s feelings and mood rooted in his individual experiences as well as his clear reason and his perfect skill.

　　The older he was, the firmer his pursue in religious faith became. He seemed wholeheartedly in pursue of the being ideal not belonging to the existing social order. Such an ideal could overstep both of the earthly profits and the cultural values. Both of culture and religion, T. S. Eliot thinks, mean the pursuing rather than the owned for either an individual or a group. As a pure artist instead of one taking art for his tool, Mr. Du had his religious pursue in his every period. Either Buddha or Christ was his soul pursue higher than his elaborated painting art. It is like what C. G. Jung says that the intellectuals today are hard to build up their religion but the religion indeed makes people in their late period keep their perseverance and their goal. We have to respect his religious pursue although we can not always have the same one.

 

During the festival of Pure Brightness (4, 5 or 6 April) in 2009

素描　61.5x88cm　1979.12

素描　122x89cm　1976.12