Equal Importance Of ‘Water’ And ‘Colour’

Ink painting flourished in the Tang Dynasty.With the maturity of the use of water and ink in Chinese painting,water and ink have equal importance in traditional Chinese painting,which becomes increasingly important in the subsequent millennia.Since the introduction of western watercolor painting into China,with the efforts of several generations of Chinese watercolor painters,they have drawn on the aesthetic taste and experience of Chinese ink painting,combined the western watercolor painting form with traditional Chinese aesthetics,emphasized the value of water in watercolor painting,and formed a unique painting language with Chinese characteristics.The author summarizes it as ‘Xishui painting technique’.This paper attempts to explore the rich artistic and humanistic connotation of this technique through relevant research and artistic practice,explain the value and uniqueness of Xishui painting technique.Through the study of the Xishui painting technique,this paper argues that the difference between the Xishui painting technique and the western traditional watercolor painting method lies in three aspects,namely the emphasis on white space,the contingency of water and the special compositional characteristics.The connotation behind its particularity lies in the inheritance and persistence of ‘nature’and ‘personality’ in the traditional Chinese aesthetic and relying on the projection of imagination to complete the appreciation of Xishui painting technique.At the practical level,the author’s experiments demonstrate the expressiveness of the‘subtraction’ of water splashing technique and the ‘addition’ of water accumulation technique,explore the possibility of other practical techniques,and prove the feasibility of the Xishui painting technique.