The Analysis Of Difference Of The Style And Representation Between Chinese Classical Figure Painting And Western Classical Figure Painting

Because of the differences in the background of history, geography and culture, China and the western countries have great differences in all fields of society. In the field of art, there emerged two different styles of figure painting: freehand brushwork in traditional Chinese figure painting and western classical abstract expressionism figure painting. During the development of the figure painting, though there are some resemblance between Chinese figure painting and western figure painting despite the time and space, the distinctions are the main.When comparing the Chinese and western classical figure painting, this article choose the aesthetic psychological description, the figure painting theme and the figure painting form as the points of comparison and analysis, to find their similarities and difference, their relationship and mutual influence. Further more the article tries to summarize the objective law of their development. The reasons for the difference of the aesthetic taste of the Chinese and the West classical figure painting are the Confucianism which have influenced Chinese life in many aspects for thousands of years, and the ancient Greek philosophy of "number" in the west. The subjects of the ancient figure painting in the two areas are also different. Because arts in China played the role of education in the ancient, there were so many historical figure paintings,describing the historical events and singing the praises of the kings, While there were few historical paintings in Italy than martial paintings which pictured the cruel scene of war directly. In Tang Dynasty, there is few paintings described war which praised the wisdom of the leaders. Under the influence of religion, the Renaissance in Italy and the Tang Dynasty have emerged a large number of excellent religious paintings, the difference is that the former gives priority to Christianity and the Bible story, and the latter focus on Buddhist figure. The image of the angel and devil’s in the former paintings are similar to human being, while the ghosts image in Tang Dynasty is very exaggerated. The Tang Dynasty society experienced a long time of peace and prosperity, so there appeared a lot of folk paintings, and in Renaissance Italy, folk paintings are relatively rare. In the matter of portrait subject, portrait painters of the Tang Dynasty created vivid and lifelike pictures to which are more subjective rather than objective, to show the painter’s aesthetic taste, ignoring the figures inner world.But the western painters in portrait painting sought to present figures physical and mental performance to transfer the character of the heart and soul of the feature to the readers. When coming to the form of representation of the painting, I chose the space perspective, color application and collocation, painting materials and tools, painting composition features, and character modeling to show the comparison.In the history of Chinese modern painting, figure painting has been in a state of no temperature. Until today, there has been a huge change in its development, but this change is not positive. It is no exaggeration to say that the development of Chinese figure painting today is far blur than a painting history. By the influence of marking and plagiarizing of art and various radical thoughts, people have a lot of illusion about painting.It is believed that deformation is beautiful, and only bizarre creations can show the painter’s talent and so on.Such radical understanding of arts leads directly to so many vulgar, ordinary odd works. Orthodox art and realism can no longer hold people’s esteem, and figure painting works also cannot show the painters’ spirit and thought.Paintings become more and more monotonous, and arts also lost its characteristics. Chinese figure painting lacks the praise of spirit.In contrast to the Western figure painting, the form and language of arts is still maintained a variety of development. Even the Japanese painting is able to maintain the original flavor of oriental features. While Chinese figure painting has shown signs of neither fish nor fowl. In fact, it is the artist’s personality, perseverance, courage and wisdom that results in the wrong direction in contemporary Chinese figure painting.The reason why I put the Chinese and Western classical figures on a comprehensive comparison is to explore the similarities and differences between the two, in order to protect the bottom line of Chinese culture, and to find the right direction to the development of contemporary Chinese figure painting,and to learn from foreign culture.