Oil painting Art blog by Lucas Art

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 nature objects. The royal family of the time, including the grand mother of the Emperor, Cixi, had a tremendous curiosity on the newly arrived technology but they never viewed it as alternative to the art of painting. Traditional Chinese painting was fundamentally an abstract art form. Although there were no absolute abstract Chinese paintings in its original meaning, objects in a painting were not a direct copy of the nature world following the principle of perspective. It was rather a combination or harmony between the nature world and human emotion, a product of “heaven (nature) and human”. The effect Chinese painters would like to illustrate in their paintings was not a visual effect of colors and patterns as their Western counterparts would like to achieve. The description of objects in their paintings was no means accurate and few concerned about such factors as colors, principle of perspective, anatomy, surface feel, and relative size. What they would like to achieve was a world in their mind of non materials. The nature world was not an object for them to make a true copy and it was rather elements for them to build their own world.

In contrast to the popular view of western painters, Chinese artists hardly considered the nature as an object but rather a subject which they worshiped. They had an uncontrollable impulse and energy to exemplify through the creation of certain image to prove the multiplicity of the nature in their mind. Remote mountains and running streams were the traces of their thinking process. The 17th century Germany philosopher Leibniz used the words Naturliche Theologie (nature theology) to describe this unique Chinese attitude towards the nature. In his Dao De ]ing, , Laozi considered the nature was the ultimate force.

“Human governed by earth; earth governed by heaven; heaven governed by Dao (the way), Dao ultimately governed by the nature”

Chinese artists often say: the whole horse is in the heart, the ripe bamboo is in the heart, the valley is in heart, etc. It means the artists need first command thorough, crisp and deep understanding of the natural existence and vivid memorization of the natural scenery, and then prepare paint and paper to start drawing. With the brush at hand, white paper and bright sky, express the emotion free from the disturbance of the worldly appearance.The silk and paper were viewed as the vague world and an infinite universe at large. The brush and pen were means of their endeavor. They would like the brush and pen to travel freely on silk and paper to reflect their freedom in an infinite universe. Apart from visual content, a landscape must have an implicit meaning. Landscape painters always left much blank space on their composition. These were space for imagination. For example, empty space in water around fish and in the sky around birds, all giving a sense that there was the presence of an ever existing universe.