Oil painting Art blog by Lucas Art

The painting style of the Sui Dynasty had a transitional characteristic from the old to the new and it was refined and beautiful. Many painters during that period assembled in the Capital and most were good at paintings of religious subje subjects. The other popular topic then was the life of aristocracy. Landscape developed into an independent style of painting during the Sui Dynasty after relative positions and ratios of landscape objects were properly addressed.

The paining is about spring outing by a group of aristocrats. There are exuberant fields with luxuriant spring sunshine. Mountains stand on the background. Ripples of water show the reflection of light. Lucid plants have announced the arrival of spring. Clouds fly smoothly anmd lazily through the mountains. Embankment extends into the distance. An arch bridge can be vaguely seen at background. Gentlemen are riding horses and walking and ladies are boating in the lake, all towards the waterfall in the centre of the painting. It is drawn from a bird’s eye view from the top. The near and far sections come focused towards the middle section, which has helped to create a rhythm of harmony with full depth of the painting. Composition is constructed along a diagonal line across from the bottom left to the top right, and it is also the direction of spring water running through the painting with mountains and embankment on each side of this invisible line, full of live and vibrancy of spring. The use of green and blue illustrates the spring colors of plants and trees. This has formed its own unique characteristic and is called “blue and green style.” The other dominant color is golden yellow. Therefore this style is further developed and called “golden green landscape” (~in bi shanshui). All the mountains, plants and stones have sketch lines only and spaces are filled with colors. The lines are very fine but full of variety.

Most art historians agreed that Spring Outing had marked a new era of Chinese painting and ended the traditional view that “characters should be larger than mountain and water can not cover major part of a painting”. During the Han Dynasty and the period of Gu Kaizhi, landscape appeared in a painting mostly in an abstract form. In the landscape painting of Zhan Ziqian, people can see his efforts to try to restore the order of nature. While admiring the wonderful nature in exuberant and lucid spring, the painter suddenly realized the original place V all human should occupy and his relationship to the nature world should be. He used many mineral pigments for the painting. However in comparison to the silk painting of the Han period, he almost used realistic spot coloring to contrast the distance between different subjects rather than the traditional abstract technique of level brushing which he only used to paint clouds around the mountains. The balance of the two created a realistic vivid world with a dreamily sensation.