Chinese Painting

 

Chinese painting originated over 5000 years ago and it is different from the Western art in its motifs, form and technique. The most important feature is that ideas and motifs are mainly represented in inked lines and dots, rather than colour, proportion and perspective.

 

Chinese paintings are created using brush pens made of a penholder and a pen head. The penholder is usually made of bamboo or wood, while the pen head is made of animal hair – wolf or sheep. Generally, only black ink is used in Chinese paintings and delicate silk and paper are used as the canvas“.

 

There are three main categories in the Chinese painting:

1. characters (it is the oldest type);

2. landscapes (generally of mountains and water, come from the tradition of seeking solitude within nature);

3. flowers and birds.

Ancient Chinese painters used paintings as an expression of their sentiments rather than merely reproducing the world on paper.

 

Chinese paintings are usually presented in scrolls and do not abide by so-called “Golden Law” – the Western notion of the Law of Proportionality. This law states that two unequal parts of a whole must be in relationship to each other to create a balanced image to the eye. Instead of the “focus perspective” used in Western paintings, Chinese use “spread-point perspective”, which offers a delicate sense of proportion. Thus, minutely detailed, all the characters and scenes are proportional from any angle.

 

Another feature of Chinese paintings is that blank spaces are commonly used. The unmarked space is used to evoke the sky. Sometimes they represent water or fog and at other times the blank space is simply nothing – just a sensation of emptiness.

 

 

 

 

· when there is a place of the ideal natural beauty, the Chinese will say “mountains and water”