On the Natural Beauty of China's Landscape Paintings

As an independent painting discipline, China's landscape painting was gradually formed at a certain social and historical stage, that is, when the natural landscape became the main aesthetic object of people and had independent aesthetic significance in the process of social practice. According to historical records, as early as in the murals of the Warring States period, "The picture shows Sichuan grotesque" ("Zuo Zhuan") appeared. There are also many descriptions of mountains, rivers, trees and other natural scenery on stone reliefs and brick reliefs in Han Dynasty. Of course, the scenery of this period is only used as the background of the characters' activities. Until the Six Dynasties, the natural landscape has become an important aesthetic object. People feel and realize that the beauty of natural landscape lies in the beautiful natural landscape itself in social practice, so the appreciation and attachment to natural beauty has become a social need and the trend of the times, and landscape paintings (and landscape poems) with independent significance have begun to appear and become unique.

According to Shi Shuo Xin Yu, after Gu Kaizhi, a great painter in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, returned from Huiji, people asked him where the beauty of mountains and rivers was. He replied: "there are thousands of rocks and valleys, which are beautiful and covered with vegetation." If the cloud is prosperous, Xia Wei will be prosperous. " Gu Kaizhi is an important figure painter who also paints landscapes, but his original landscape paintings have already spread all over the world, leaving only a note of painting Yuntai Mountain and several landscape poems. Zong Bing and Wang Wei, landscape painters in Liu and Song Dynasties, each wrote an article on landscape painting. From their painting theory, we can know that landscape painters at that time created landscape paintings mainly out of appreciation and love for natural beauty. For example, Zong Bing has traveled to the famous mountains in the south of the Yangtze River in his life. "He traveled west to Jason Wu and south to Heng Yue because he married Hengshan and was pregnant with Shang Ping's ambition. After returning to Jiangling, he sighed at the sun and said, "Hey! When you are old and sick, it is difficult to travel all over the famous mountains and rivers. All you have to do is look at the Tao with a clear head and lie down and swim. "No matter where you go, you are looking at the wall, sitting and lying down. (See "Famous Paintings of Past Dynasties", Volume 6) The landscape paintings of this period basically reflect the beauty of natural landscapes truthfully. "In terms of layout, from the overall point of view, we should pursue the ideal effect of" viewing "and" swimming "and master the basic methods of body perspective in the far-near method. The so-called "painting three inches vertically, one thousands of feet higher; A few feet of ink is horizontal and a hundred miles long. Therefore, it is a natural trend for people who look at pictures to suffer from class misfortune and not be burdened by class. If this is the case, the beauty of loosening and the spirit of Xuanzang can be obtained in one painting. " (Zong Bing's Preface to Painting Landscape) These expositions show that the painter's ability to feel and appreciate natural beauty at that time has reached a considerable level.

The natural beauty of China's early landscape painters lies in nature itself, and the landscape painting is rooted in the idea of natural beauty, with an obvious tendency of materialistic reflection theory, which is the source of ancient realistic artistic spirit and has a great influence on later generations. Inspired and influenced by this idea, most landscape painters of past dynasties insisted on understanding the relationship between landscape painting art and realistic natural landscape from the perspective of reflection theory, holding that natural beauty is the original source of landscape painting, emphasizing that painters should learn from nature and "learn from nature" and deeply understand and grasp the essential laws of natural beauty. At the beginning of Sui Dynasty, Yao Zui clearly put forward for the first time in "Continued Painting" that the creation of landscape painting should "learn from nature" and "move must be true". In the Tang Dynasty, Zhang Xuan said, "If you learn from a foreign teacher, you can gain a heavenly heart"; Hao Jing, a master of landscape painting in the Five Dynasties, advocated "measuring things to get the truth" in his painting "brushwork" theory; In this Song Dynasty, Fan Kuan thought that painting landscapes was "not like learning from others, but like learning from nature". In the Ming Dynasty, Yuan Hongdao wrote in "On Painting in a Bottle of Flowers": "A good painter learns from others, a good scholar learns from his heart, and a good teacher learns from everything without learning from his ancestors"; Lv Wang, a painter, said with deep feelings in the preface to Huatong: "If you don't know the shape of Huashan, how can I paint?" ..... the heart of my teacher, the eye of the heart teacher, and the eye teacher Huashan "; Shi Tao, a painter in the early Qing Dynasty, also advocated that landscape painting should be "born out of mountains and rivers" and "made from all the strange peaks", and so on. Although the views of these landscape painters in different times are very simple, they are very summative and insightful. China's cultural tradition is extensive and profound, which can't be summarized in one sentence at a glance. But when it comes to the tradition of landscape painting, the aesthetic thought of "learning from nature" is the most fundamental and main tradition of China's landscape painting.

It is the tradition of "learning from nature" that inspires painters of past dynasties to "take the Wan Li Road", go to nature, go to real mountains and rivers, experience, know, appreciate and express the great rivers and mountains of the motherland, study the context and source of mountains and rivers, the forms and characteristics of flowers and trees, and keep innovating and never give up. It is also the tradition of "learning from nature" that makes the works of painters of past dynasties full of vigor and vitality, and also makes China's landscape painting develop through thousands of generations since it became an independent discipline in the Six Dynasties. Look at the successful landscape painters in modern times. They all inherited the fundamental tradition of "learning from nature", took nature as their teacher, innovated and found a new way, and had their own style in art. Huang Yisheng traveled all over the mountains and accumulated thousands of manuscripts before writing landscapes. Fu grabbed the stone for a long time, and he was really a landscape, so he painted the vitality and charm of nature; Li Keran is full of its own characteristics; Liu Haisu visited Huangshan Mountain for ten times, and became friends with Huangshan Mountain as a teacher, only then did he draw the spiritual temperament of Huangshan Mountain. Under the advocacy of Yaming, the representative of Jinling Painting School, Qin Jianming and other nine contemporary painters inherited the tradition of "learning from nature". After several months of walking Wan Li Road, climbing cliffs, walking cloisters, canoeing and breaking waves, they created the masterpiece of China's landscape painting history-the Three Gorges Epic at the beginning of the new century.

Painters feel and discover natural beauty in reality, and fully and intensively express the beauty of natural landscape with pen and ink according to their own understanding and appreciation of natural beauty. This is the true meaning of "learning from nature".

The painter's understanding of natural beauty has been deepening and developing, and the landscape painting that expresses natural beauty has also been developing and changing in pen and ink techniques, as Shi Tao said: "Pen and ink should follow the times." The most important thing is that the changes of pen and ink techniques come from the "heart source" of painters in different times, and the "heart source" of painters cannot be separated from nature. Therefore, it can be said that all the traditions and techniques of pen and ink in history originated from the tradition of "imitating nature".

Sui and Tang Dynasties are a transitional period in the history of China's landscape painting. From You Chuntu handed down from Zhan Ziqian to Jin Bi landscape of Li Sixun and his son, it is basically a continuation of the painting style of the Six Dynasties, and the techniques have also been displayed by the people, but the changes are not too great. The main performance is that the lines are full of colors, and more attention is paid to the richness and vividness of colors. The twists and turns of lines are recorded with a pen, but the method has not yet been formed, and the distance has begun to develop from a physical perspective from near to far to a spatial perspective that shows the truth and falsehood. This is related to the painter's understanding of natural beauty at that time, that is, the beauty of natural landscape lies in the natural landscape itself, and the basic forms of natural beauty are natural phenomena such as strange shapes, colorful colors and clouds. China's landscape painting has developed to the Five Dynasties and the Northern Song Dynasty, and great changes have taken place in pen and ink techniques, with various painting methods, such as Fan Kuan's watercress painting, his axe painting, his painting and Xun Yuan painting, his horse painting, and the figures in leaves and pepper painting. The emergence of these new techniques is fundamentally due to the deeper understanding of natural beauty by landscape painters at that time, which rose from sensibility to rationality and from phenomenon to essence. For example, in Fan Kuan's The Journey to the West, painting love deliberately shows the magnificence, sublimity and greatness of nature, which is the majestic momentum of the mountains and rivers in the north. In this way, the past marking techniques are powerless, while the painting method can fully show the great sense of volume and texture of natural mountains and rivers, as well as the harmonious relationship between man and nature. The so-called "painting the truth" and Guo's so-called landscape painting should be both "feasible and promising" and "able to swim and live", and "looking at this painting makes people feel like they are in this mountain", all of which strive to fully express the inherent nature of natural beauty by depicting the external form of natural landscape. Therefore, the natural beauty embodied in the landscape paintings of this period, whether it is the magnificent mountains and rivers in the north (such as The Journey to the West in Fan Kuan) or the beauty of the scenery in the south (such as Dong Yuan's Xiaoxiang Map), is a special and universal beauty, which is the ideal beauty that the painter deeply understands and feels. Because of the deepening and development of landscape painters' understanding of natural beauty, landscape paintings that express natural beauty will continue to create and innovate in techniques. In a sense, there is no end to "learning from nature", there is no end to aesthetic comprehension, and there is no end to the innovation of pen and ink techniques.

Because China's landscape painting is the product of the painter's "externalization of nature", its content is the painter's aesthetic comprehension and feelings about nature on the one hand, and the painter's aesthetic feelings, feelings and ideals on the other hand, which is the unity of emotion and reason, meaning and environment. Landscape painters of past dynasties did not reproduce nature with indifference, but "wrote mountains with emotion and painted water with meaning", conveyed feelings with objects, painted landscapes with emotion, and paid attention to the expression of emotions, especially the expression of noble sentiments and aesthetic ideals, which is another fine tradition of China's landscape painting.

As early as the Six Dynasties and the Liu and Song Dynasties, Wang Wei, a landscape painter, advocated expressing emotions directly in his works, and put forward the views of "the cause of painting" and "the feeling of painting" in his painting theory "Virtual China": "The eyebrows and cheeks are complementary, if it is clumsy; Lonely rock Yu Xiu, if you spit clouds; Then Gongguan boat and car, gathering together; Dogs, horses, birds and fish are divided by shape; The cause of this painting is also. Looking at the autumn clouds, the gods fly; Facing the spring breeze, thinking strongly; Although there is the joy of stone, how can it be like this? According to the plan, the effect is different from that of mountains and seas, green forests raise wind and white water rapids, alas! Is it possible to carry the palm alone and descend with the gods? This painting is also affectionate. " In Wang Wei's view, the creation of landscape painting is not only a simple technical problem, but more importantly, it is to express the painter's aesthetic comprehension of natural mountains and rivers, and at the same time, it is necessary to pour all the feelings and feelings of the painter when he knows the beauty of nature into his works. In the Tang Dynasty, Zhang Yanyuan praised Zong Bing's landscape paintings, saying that Zhan Ziqian's works "touch things with kindness, and everything is wonderful", and he also attached great importance to the expression of emotions in paintings. Especially after the Song and Yuan Dynasties, painters paid more attention to the expression of subjective feelings and aesthetic personality in landscape painting creation, and demanded that the works achieve the blending of scene and scene. For example, Su Shi advocated that painting should be "between the lines"; Ni Zan painted "Talk and Write Escape in the Chest"; Dong Qichang said that painting "the distant mountains are combined and powerful, the sparse forest is high or low, and there is affection"; Tang Yin believes that painting should be "sentimental"; Shi Tao said: "Mountains and rivers are also important to the formation of mountains and rivers", "Mountains and rivers also have traces when they meet gods"; Kong Yan painted landscapes "regardless of size, create landscapes with emotion", and so on.

It is of great significance for landscape painters of past dynasties to emphasize the expression of emotion in their landscape painting creation. Huang Zeng wrote in one of his landscape sketches: "I like to take mountains as portraits, and splash ink to see the spirit." It is this "love" and this "spirit" that makes the mountains, forests, rivers and waterfalls written by landscape painters of past dynasties saturated with the author's healthy feelings of loving the beauty of nature and the lofty spirit of loving the great rivers and mountains of the motherland. From Kuang Lu Tu, The Journey to the West of Fan Kuan, Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains Tu of Wang Ximeng, Fuchun of Huang, Huashan Tu of Huang, and many excellent landscape paintings in modern times, people can deeply feel this emotion and sentiment.

If the landscape painting before the Song Dynasty pays more attention to "nature" and lyricism after the Yuan Dynasty, then the organic combination of the two is the essence of China's landscape painting. In fact, landscape paintings in different historical periods, whether focusing on the middle scenery or focusing on the middle scenery, only focus on differences, and the two are always organically combined. Imitate nature, express emotions, scenery and feelings, things and me, that is, the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in artistic creation, and the relationship between the expression of objects and the expression of subjects. China's landscape paintings have always been dialectical in dealing with the relationship between them, and never go to extremes. Painters of past dynasties have truly reproduced the beauty of natural landscapes, but also poured or rendered their own thoughts and feelings, making their works true, affectionate and serious, and the integrated artistic conception can please the feelings of viewers and cultivate people's sentiments.

The aesthetic consciousness and ideals of landscape painters of past dynasties, their love for the beautiful mountains and rivers of the motherland, their understanding and concern for natural beauty, universe and life, and their inheritance and innovation of brush and ink techniques have accumulated into a rich tradition of landscape painting in China today. In this rich tradition, today's landscape painters will have greater and more free choices, and there is also the possibility of innovation that is more in line with the requirements of the times. Therefore, landscape painting is not only a reflection of natural beauty, but also a symbol of the spirit of the Chinese nation, which has its own strong vitality.