Promised Land

This paper concentrates on the relationship between paintings and regionalism in order to discuss how paintings could transcend regionalism to accomplish their inner construction.Regional paintings represent the crucial and realistic parts of art history.The studies of art history tend to stress the reviews of history itself including comments on artists' life and criticisms on their works,whereas few researches have been found on the multilayer correlations between regions and artists as well as paintings and the real world.The paper firstly analyzes the relationship between regional features,artists and paintings,studies contemporary regional paintings of China,including folk paintings,by field research,and sorts out problems and confusion of Chinese contemporary regional paintings in the process of development and deformation.Then by parsing Barbizon school and the relationship between Cezanne and his hometown Aix,this paper discusses the geographical origins of artists and their correlations,and on the basis of which it elucidates major art schools and artists ' transcendence of regionalism how they achieved the transcendence.In addition,the paper also appeals to reconstruct the relationship between paintings and regions,recollect the original power of paintings and ask for further discussions about contemporary paintings in the age of image media.This paper includes the following parts: introduction,main body(part 1 & part 2)and conclusion.IntroductionThis part briefly describes the relation between painting and regionalism and the necessity and possibility that paintings transcend the regionalism to accomplish profound construction,and based on which it elucidates the objectives and significance of the paper.Part 1(Chapter1 � Chapter 3)The Origin and reflectivity of the themeBy reviewing the history of regional paintings,this part describes the relation between regional features and artists,analyses cases of regional paintings in modern China and discusses the problems and confusion involved in its development.Part 2 of the body(Chapter 4 � Chapter 5)Transcendence and MethodologyThis part focuses on the transcendence of the regional paintings and it's methodology based on the analysis of the cases of Barbizon school and Cezanne's works about Aix.Firstly,the historic,cultural regional and geographical backgrounds of Barbizon school are referred to analyze works of related artists in order to elaborate the reasons why these paintings can transcend the regionalism.Then,it describes the fact that Cezanne took the hometown scenery as inspirations to recreate works of Poussin after he withdrew from Impressionism,and returned to his hometown,Aix.This part probes into the methodology of how Cezanne explored the integrity and eternity of natural world by using shape construction,color designing and inner restoration in order to accomplish comprehensive transcendence of specified regional scenery.Lastly,it further illustrates the co-existence of artists and regions,paintings and geography: Only when paintings are deeply rooted in regions,when the subjective spirits of artists are co-constructed with regional characteristics,when the artists compose motifs which derive from their hometowns and combine their own historic experiences with the works,can the integrity of the natural world,which is full of collision,occurrence and convergence be gradually manifested.ConclusionBased on the research of transcendence of regional paintings and its methodology,this paper indicates that transcendence doesn't meantranscendentalism,instead,it's a promised land and an authentic realm of lives' existence and mutual collision,which can be reached through artists' visual observation,physical and spiritual experience.The thought of vision is what paintings should possess and where the true characteristics of paintings should be born.This paper is also open for questions which are worthy of concentration and contemplation.