What is the beauty of painting?

Painting aesthetics is the art of creating visual images on a two-dimensional plane by using colors and lines. Paleolithic cave murals in Europe are the earliest human painting remains found at present. In the long-term development of painting, realistic style and abstract style coexist. Prehistoric cave murals are realistic, while the art of colored stone age is basically abstract.

Different understandings of the essence of painting Among all art forms, painting is the closest to imitation theory. Plato, Leonardo da Vinci and others used painting as an example when comparing art to a mirror. Faithfully reappearing the true image of the outside world is regarded as the essence of painting by many aestheticians. Under the influence of this habit, people who appreciate painting often pay attention to what objects it reproduces first. In the fourth chapter of Poetics, Aristotle believes that ugly things will arouse people's pleasure after vivid imitation, because people are looking for and seeking knowledge at the same time. What he said about seeking knowledge refers to the objective graphics of real things that can be recognized in the painting image. The research results of modern psychology show that there are two kinds of psychological factors that constitute human experience: ① the direct perception of things by the subject, and ② the images left in the brain after the subject leaves the specific things. Images are divided into memory images and creative images, the latter mainly refers to an image that can never appear in reality and is created with the active participation of subjective consciousness. Whether painting creation mainly depends on perception or image, whether it depends on memorizing image or creating image, involves different understandings of the essence of painting. Some people think that painting, as an art, its essence determines that its creative process mainly depends on images, especially creative images. It is impossible to create a painting simply by perception, and everyone's perception of specific things is similar. Different painters have different ways of expressing the same thing, mainly because the artist's image has distinct personality differences. However, some people think that the role of perception is basic, and perception itself has distinct ability of choice and organization, so the creative process of realistic painting mainly depends on perception.

Western Painting Aesthetics During the Renaissance, many painters devoted themselves to the study of realistic techniques that can improve the realism of painting, such as perspective, light and shade, anatomy, proportion, composition, etc., which have been widely and deeply studied. /kloc-in the 9th century, while realistic painting techniques directly related to scientific laws were highly developed, many western painters found new expressive force in oriental painting. Some impressionist painters and fauvism painters gave up the pursuit of three-dimensional space and turned to the plane sense of oriental painting. With the invention of photography and the influence of various social factors, the basic appearance of western painting has undergone fundamental changes due to the appearance of abstraction. Abstract painting mainly refers to the painting style that is opposite to the traditional realistic style since the 20th century. Its main feature is to simplify and deform the image of natural things into geometric or irregular non-figurative graphics, or even completely abandon the external characteristics of natural things, and create according to the artist's purely subjective ideas, emphasizing that artists use unconscious shapes to express their subconscious self. Abstraction abandons the image of concrete things, thus eliminating the knowledge-seeking function of Aristotle's paintings. A painting usually contains two basic elements: expression and expression. Since19th century, the long and changeable process of western painting, from classicism, romanticism, realism, impressionism, post-impressionism to the appearance of abstraction, can basically be attributed to the process that expressive factors are gradually strengthened until they are completely submerged and replaced. As early as before the First World War, France, Russia, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Britain, Spain and other countries successively produced modernist painting movements under different flags. Abstraction is a general term for all kinds of non-figurative paintings. The so-called "abstract expressionism", "process art", "accidental art" and many other schools all have a common feature, that is, they give up the form in the real sense. "Abstractionism is to escape from the turbulent reality and move towards an aesthetic harmonious world completely controlled by artists", an abstract motto, clearly shows the social roots of abstraction. In this sense, although abstraction does not directly represent society, it is a direct expression of social emotions. Secondly. Modern western philosophy has also promoted the development of abstraction. For example, the existentialist philosopher J.-P. Sartre once made it clear that all the unrealistic consciousness produced by the artist's self in loneliness is precisely the object of painting. Some abstract painters mainly want to express the fear of human beings facing the abyss of nothingness, while others are influenced by Kant's philosophy and think that there is another elusive essence behind the phenomenon world that needs to be explored and expressed. Painting becomes art because it can turn the invisible into the visible. In this sense, the prevalence of abstraction is closely related to the bourgeois philosophical trend of thought in modern western countries. Some abstractists think that the essence of painting should be similar to music, the rhythm of color is the most important aesthetic factor in painting, and color itself represents the meaning component in painting, so they try to restore all intuitive images to the movement of color.

At the same time of the prevalence of abstraction, the so-called "surrealism" or "photo realism" appeared in western painting. It advocates that painting should imitate photos to avoid any subjective color of the painter, and thinks that the painter's duty is only to record the image of things objectively like a camera, and even try to reproduce objects more accurately than color photos to restore the vitality of realistic painting. This "surrealism" theory holds that when a painter interprets or hints at praise or criticism of what he depicts, he is bound to stay away from the objective truth of things.

Because "surrealism" deliberately gives up the pursuit of meaning, the meaning of those paintings that show the image very clearly is vague. "Abstractionism" and "Surrealism" have different extreme understandings of the essence of painting, but their views are the same in the lack of clear meaning.

Aesthetics of Chinese Painting The aesthetics of traditional painting in China is quite different from that in the West. In the basic painting principles of "conveying the spirit with form" and "having both form and spirit", we oppose both the naturalism tendency of one-sided pursuit of form and the mystical formalism tendency of isolating "God" from "form". Huai Nan Zi in Han Dynasty once mentioned that "the painter lost his shape because of his love for hair", and the distinction between "hair" and "form" prepared for the later distinction between "form" and "spirit". Gu Kaizhi, a great painter in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, put forward that "form is the foundation and the purpose of writing' form'" and advocated "imagination is wonderful" to highlight the essence of objects. The achievements of his theory in practice can still be seen in the volume of Luo Shen Fu.

In the Southern Dynasties, Sheikh put "vivid charm" at the top of the Six Laws, and took "writing with a pen" as the main means to unify "form" and "spirit". Therefore, the theory of "Yun Qi" is actually a continuation of the theory of "writing gods". Zong Bing (375 ~ 443) of the Six Dynasties put forward the idea that landscape painters should "reflect the Tao" and "landscape should be flat with shape". He believes that painters should guide "form" with "Tao" and emphasize that "form writes with form and color writes with form". The former's "shape" and "color" are shapes and colors with subjective psychological tendency, so we can control the latter's "shape" and "color" as objective factors.

Many landscape painters in ancient China did not draw from sketches, but often painted from memory after traveling around famous mountains and rivers. The nature in their works is often the nature rendered by the soul. Painters often give up the focus perspective of a fixed point of view and adopt decentralized perspective, so that viewers can wander in the picture in their imagination. Some people call the appreciation of landscape painting "lying tour". Because landscape painting gave up the focus perspective, denied the fixed viewpoint and light source, and also showed the texture of the object, there appeared the unique technique of China landscape painting-painting. It is very different from the light and shade in western painting, which can not only show the light and shade relationship of objective things, but also show the painter's subjective interest in pen and ink.

Since the Six Dynasties, the number of literati painters has gradually increased. Gu Kaizhi, Zong Bing and so on. They are all literati. Later, in the Tang, Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasties, literati entertained themselves by painting after poetry and prose, so they began to take literati painting as the mainstream stage. Its main feature is that it emphasizes freehand brushwork and ignores realism. In the Tang Dynasty, Zhang Yanyuan (8 15 ~ 875) put forward the importance of establishing "meaning", and thought that "meaning precedes writing, painting with meaning, so it is full of gas". The principle of attaching importance to "meaning" was fully reflected in literati paintings in the late Song Dynasty and early Yuan Dynasty. The meaning of "intention before writing" is different from the meaning expressed after the completion of artistic works, but mainly refers to the creative intention that precedes the creative process in time, which often needs to be further clarified and improved in the creative process. Although Chinese painting can be divided into two categories: meticulous brushwork that emphasizes reproduction factors and freehand brushwork that emphasizes expression factors, they are interlinked. Advocating freehand brushwork and belittling meticulous painting began in the Ming Dynasty, but this view is one-sided. The murals of Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes and Shanxi Yongle Palace, Han Xizai's The Night Banquet of the Five Dynasties, Yan's The Kings of Past Dynasties, and the freehand brushwork of Shi Tao, Wu Changshuo, Qi Baishi and Pan Tianshou are all part of China's outstanding painting heritage, and their aesthetic values are irreplaceable.