Oil painting Art blog by Lucas Art

The famous Chinese historian Qian Mu once said, apart l from calligraphy the most important form of Chinese arts was paintings. Although the earliest Chinese paintings can be dated back to prehistoric times, most paintings in the Qin (221 t0 206 BC) and Han (206 BC t0 220 AD) Dynasties were murals and stone carvings [...]

The discovery of photography in 1839 caused a panic among the painters in Europe. The primary way of painting in the West was to imitate the nature rather than express it. When they saw an apparatus could do the job better than they could, they felt a sense of despair. Paul Klee (1879 t0 1940) said art started to express the spirit rather the material world from the moment photography was invented. Therefore from 19t” century, the western painting started to embark on a new trend of modernism. Ten years after its discovery, photography arrived in China but it never had a same impact on the Chinese painters than it did in the west although the culture elite and the ruling class in China admired the magic power of western painters for their ability to copy

During the Sui (581 t0 618 AD) and the Tang (618 t0 907 AD) Dynasties, a system of official examination was developed to select mandarins to serve the empires. Therefore a culture elite class was formed from the early stages of Chinese imperial history. Their ultimate aim was to do the examination well, to be selected and therefore to become a mandarin in order to achieve their political ambitions. In order to reach this ultimate goal they had to read and write thoroughly and extensively in order to become a cultured person and “gentleman” and also to be successful for the examination. Painting and poetry training was a very important part in this endeavour. The greatest Chinese philosopher and scholar, Confucius, said to his fellow students: “ambition must come from