|
To understand the lack of color
in many Chinese landscape paintings, one must fully appreciate the interrelationship
of calligraphy and painting. Calligraphy
and painting use the same formats and tools (brush,
ink, paper, and
silk). The basic methods of handling a brush and
ink to create the individual strokes of a Chinese character can also be used to
create descriptive lines and textures in painting. It
was during the Tang dynasty that the full expressive
potential of ink was realized, as suggested in this quote from the ninth-century
art historian, Zhang Yanyuan:
Grasses and trees may display
their glory without the use of reds and greens; clouds and snow may swirl and
float aloft without the use of white color; mountains may show greenness without
the use of blues and greens; and a phoenix may look colorful without the use of
the five colors. For this reason a painter may use ink alone and yet all five
colors may seem present in his painting. In
this hanging scroll, entitled Woods
and Valleys of Mount Yu, by the artist Ni Zan (1306–1374),
the correspondence between calligraphy and painting becomes apparent. It is a
sparse, seemingly simple landscape devoid of human presence.
Western
paintings, like photographs, tend to present images of landscapes from a fixed
point of view with a mathematically constructed illusion of recession, or perspective,
which makes space appear to recede toward a single "vanishing point." Chinese
landscape paintings use a moving perspective based on the notion of three distances
(near, middle, and far) which allows the eye to move between various pictorial
elements without being limited to one fixed, static point of view. Thus, the viewer
is encouraged to ramble through the landscape image.
Ni Zan, using abstract
brushstrokes to suggest three-dimensional forms, exploits the tension between
surface pattern and the illusion of recession to animate his composition. In this
painting, where the bottom section acts as the foreground while the top acts as
the background, a series of diagonal forms draws the viewer's focus upward across
the picture surface as well as deeper into the represented space. |
