Passionate, Magnificent, Talented—Reading Artist Yan Chao’s Paintings
By He Shuhua
Magnificent, passionate and talented are my first impression on reading Yan Chao’s paintings, especially his free-style Chinese painting.
The difference between painters and gardeners is the emotional states painters are in all the time. From his works we can see he was painting with passion. That is very important to create a good painting. Primarily, creation requires passion and inspiration which are the soul of painting. Techniques are the parents of painting. But to make it live, we need Qi and blood, that is ideology. Painting also requires courage and insight. Reading Yan Chao’s paintings, we can feel his talent, courage and insight. His painting path is quite wide. His landscape, bird-and-flower, figure paintings and calligraphy all have strong appeals. Especially, his free-style landscape painting are magnificent under his free, bold and smooth brushwork. With his extraordinary imagination, he can turn the momentum of the mountain into flying clusters of cloud and make the painting dynamic yet dignified and solemn by the richness of landscape. The audience can be moved heartedly by his splash-ink landscape painting. Reading his splash-ink landscape painting, the attraction of the “form” will fade gradually; only live thought remains. Your emotions come in and out of the painting. Such self-awareness originated from creation changes into moderate tension of the work. The solemn yet ethereal artistic conception or virtual realm of the work is implicitly expressed through large blank spaces or clouds or streams in succinct brush-ink. To achieve all these, an artist should have not only high-level artistic culture but also plenty of techniques and experience in brush-ink composition to create good works. With his love for the Great Nature and persistent pursuit of creating beauty, Yan Chao has traveled tens of thousands of miles to visit famous mountains and rivers all over the country and created hundreds of excellent works. Apart from bold use of ink, he also advocates “bone-like use of brush” and “start painting from practicing calligraphy”. From some of his works we can see his unique artistic view. He is building an all-round open spirit world with his own artistic ideas. His success is closely related to his erudition, tolerant study ideology and artistic practice.