Backed By Mountains And Waters

In the 1950s and 1960s after the founding of new china, flower-bird painting innovation was a hot topic in the art field where almost all art workers were trying their best to explore best ways of reflecting real life. A variety of art exhibitions, sketches, discussions, and theoretical polemics appeared and finally converged into a rolling torrent. Guo weiqu , an outstanding flower-bird painter in this torrent, for his daring quest and practice directed by a series of systematic theories, became one of the most modern and innovative painters who innovated the traditional flower-bird painting in a planned way and with exact measures. A scholar-painter proficient in the quintessence of traditional flower-bird painting, he was neither as extreme as those artists who comprehensively denied the traditional painting techniques, nor as conservative as those who were repugnant to the innovation. He inherited the fine painting skills of flower-bird painting and at the same time endowed it with a new life. In technique, he made bold inventions of three-in-one, that is: landscapes, birds and flowers combined with meticulous and freehand brushwork, ink splashing with thick colors. He advocated that flower-bird painters must go deep into two kinds of life: one is natural life, the other is social life. In-depth probe into natural life is to seek illuminations in nature for the purpose of developing new materials and breaking the old forms of picture composition. Penetrating into social life is to understand people, understand the community, concern about the development of the times, and to create new artistic conceptions with the principle of depicting national character. His life was transient but his works made significant contributions to the transformation of flower-bird painting from tradition pattern to modern ones in theory and practice. Theoretically, integrated with his teaching experience, he summarized a set of teaching principle, i.e. trinity in copying, sketching and creating, collaborative progress in theory, life and skills, which is also applicable to his innovation. In practice, guided by a positive Confucian thinking of involving into secular life and that of materialist dialectics, supported by the theory of full accomplishment of both Chinese and Western painting; principled by progress with times and service for people, Guo weiqu comprehensively absorbed the nutrition of art both in academy and among the people at home and abroad from ancient to modern, created a flourishing and distinctively new type of micro-flower-bird painting and left many outstanding works to later generations. This paper seeks to reveal the motivation of Guo weiqu's aesthetic evolution in the process of innovation, ways of and outcome of his innovation, as well as the inspirations brought to the current flower-bird painting creation, so on and so forth..