Zhou Zhou: From Writer to Painter

The name Zhou is no stranger to friends in the intellectual circles of our province. Senior editor in Chinese and English of Anhui People's Publishing House, member of Chinese Writers Association. In recent years, he has married literature and Dan Qing. Under the brush, all kinds of peonies are competing to open up and compete for beauty.

Zhou was born in 1948, and has experienced ups and downs with the growth of new China. He used to be a farmer, a soldier, a worker, a middle school Chinese teacher, a reporter and an editor. He created and published a collection of novels and essays, Zi Peng Yuan, and a novel, Teacher Pu and His Students. 1Zhou, born in 1980, saw the momentum of China's reform and opening up more and more fierce, and deeply felt that the development of a national literature could not be separated from foreign cultural exchanges. Since then, he has worked hard to teach himself a foreign language. 1987 Translated and published the English documentary novel Strange.

Dancer has been affirmed by Wen Wei Po and extensive reading. 1996, at the invitation of Anhui Literature and Art Publishing House, translated the world-famous novel Oliver Twist, which was reprinted many times and was welcomed by readers and praised by experts. Knowing my fate, I began to explore another more direct communication language-painting.

Zhou believes that painting, like music, has no national boundaries. It is a visual art of "silence is better than sound" and can be easily communicated more directly and widely. He liked painting when he was a teenager, and began to take up photography in the 1970s. After he was transferred to the publishing house, he had a lot of contacts with celebrities in the painting world and benefited a lot. He sized up the situation, picked up a brush and painted peonies. He said: Peony is the national flower, which has irreplaceable significance in communicating with the outside world. In order to draw Chinese paintings well, he asked many peony painters for advice and learned from them. He studied under China's "King of Peony" and is now an art professor at Luoyang University in Sun Yude. He went to Luoyang twice at his own expense to observe the peony blossom and took more than 200 photos of peony.

There are close artistic similarities between literature and painting. It is Zhou's artistic pursuit to introduce literary artistic conception and image into painting and integrate the essence of Chinese and western aesthetics into painting. The peony he painted is between traditional meticulous painting and freehand brushwork, with oil painting meaning, similar shape and strong charm; Composition breaks time and space, pays attention to absorbing the nutrients of western modernist empathy theory, abstract theory and psychoanalytic aesthetics, and makes the picture reflect the unique humanistic ideal.

Zhou is now a senior painter in China Painting and Calligraphy Research Institute, and his peony paintings often appear in newspapers and magazines. Many paintings have been collected by international friends such as the United States, Britain, Germany, Russia, Mexico, Singapore and Thailand. Because he pays attention to absorbing the artistic characteristics of Chinese New Year pictures, his peony paintings are very popular among ordinary people.