|
Out of the necessity to help "establish social mores and keep ethical order", the ruling class in the past tended to attach great importance to the portrait painting. It has been a prominent genre in the graphic arts and accordingly the reason why I devote my study to this subject. All human endeavor, be it material or spiritual, can be traced and examined through the developments in such areas as painting, music and drama as well as from historical archives. This study is thus an effort to present the graphic arts as a reflection of social milieu and its cultural connotation.
It is the gist of this study to focus, as mentioned, on the ink-painting as a way to reflect social milieu and its cultural connotation, with the hope that it may help further our understanding of the different stages in the development of traditional Chinese portrait painting. I also try to cite examples from Chinese and Western paintings, old and new, to show how an artist, by means of his own creativity, achieved to visualize his metaphors and hold a mirror up to the contemporary society.
It is my belief that an analysis of documentary records and a comparison of Chinese and Western pictorial idioms may help us understand an artist's creative ideas and his thinking process. I also believe that by studying how an artist , through his knowledge of anatomy and a keen observation and synthesis of outside world information, made a good use of color, lines, ink, stroke and composition to create his own portraiture, we can enrich our experience to create our own portrait paintings..Our understanding of this whole process, from the birth of an idea and a draft and all the way to the final touch, will be able to help us in finding a way to express our own unique experience and create the kind of portrait painting with a specific Oriental flavors.
This study is to point out that as an artist works from his daily experience, he starts from his sense, develops his ideas in mind and expresses them in his finished works. While always keep tradition in mind, his job is to relate the contemporary society faithfully. Each generation may have its own tastes and trends, an artist is to grasp the shifting times and make his own choice of subject matter. My idea of an artist is one who can follow the footsteps of old masters and make new expression in his creative works at the same time. In short, he is to work as a historian, to record the society, the land and the people.
|