Talking About The Song Dynasty Painting Color

Color, with its significant effect, plays an important role in the history of traditional Chinese painting. And our predecessors attached importance to the use of color in painting from ancient times until the Neolithic Age of five or six years ago. So far we can still see a lot of colorful silk paintings, tomb murals and scroll paintings, which are the precious cultural heritage that the ancestors left for us. Bird and flower painting, as an independent form of art, has never been discarding the application of color from the stages of embryo, development to the official formation. Sung dynasty is a peaking period for development of bird and flower painting. Under the influence of the two schools represented by Huang Quan and Xu Xi, the bird and flower painting's color presented two manners of applying color, Huang with a silver spoon and Xu with Simplicity. The school of Huang mostly used the rare birds, wonderful flowers and stones as the motif of creation to present the palace living flavor. Vast majority of their compositions gave us the vision system including bright colors and clear and neat fine brushwork. They pursued the real feeling of the bright-colored flowers'color from natural life. Its characteristics were light with floating and strong with muddying. The school of Xu chased after the quiet natural beauty from the carefree life. The motif of creation which was represented by the innocent of the ink and the weakening light proper color was very simple. At the late sung dynasty, Song Huizong, zhaoji, who raised the artists into the highest position of the Chinese history during his time, was very artistic. He set up imperial art academy. The creation of the bird and flower paintings was extremely prosperous. What Xu-Huang had done gave impetus to the progress of the bird and flower painting in the Southern Song Dynasty. The school of Huang was more elaborate, gorgeous, vivid and smooth. At the same time, in the school of Xu the literati having the consciousness leaded the art circles and developed the style of setting pen to paper for the standard. The fine flower-and-bird paintings in Sung dynasty had undergone the human accumulation and the hand-down and development of Chinese art for three hundred years. With the profound effect on the modern painters, the bird and flower paintings in Song dynasty were learned by modern prominent painters at painting beginning. A lot of modern outstanding painters in bird and flower have benefited from the Song dynasty's paintings.