On The Yan Wengui " Yan's View " Artistic Characteristics

Wengui Yan was a painter of Imperial Painting academy between Five Dynasties and early Northern-Song Dynasty.The ascending stage of his works is in Emperor Renzong period. The achievement of Wengui Yan's painting technique was praised by many of his contemporaries,although overwhelmed by several landscape masters'in the Northern Song Dynasty, in the perspective of modern people.As one of the earliest folk painters holding an office in the Imperial Painting academy,Yan's paintings had caught attentions of various social classes at his time. With his unique style of painting, Yan won high praise via "the Landscape in Yan's Works ". Although modeled after the painting techniques of Cheng Li, Kuan Fan and other Northern Song Dynasty landscape painting masters, Wengui Yan showed his unique techniques, rather than traditional ones, in his paintings. The vigorous expressive forms of mountains in Yan's paintings followed the paradigms of composition in Kuan Fan's landscape paintings of wild northern China,but meanwhile added in more delicate flavors;the expressive techniques of trees and rocks in Yan's paintings were more laconic and straightforward compared with Cheng Li's ones,and the technique of drawing used in Yan's works represented his style of gracefulness and innovativeness which was neither unlike Kuan Fan's vigorousness and experiencedness, or Cheng Li's depressiveness and coldness.Wengui Yan not only obtained extraordinary achievement on landscape painting,but also mastered the secrets of miniature and figure painting,which was merged into his landscape paintings and turned into his unique style.Wengui Yan used to draw landscape paintings mixed with elegant pavilions as well as vivid figures and scenes.Yan's landscape paintings were filled with life, but nonetheless didn't appear to be inflexible and boring because of their orderliness and gracefulness. The delicate and lively pictures in Yan's works had begun a new era of folk painting,which reflected the composition of traditional Chinese painting and perspective observation.Yan was praiseworthy in his creative ideas of "drawing inspiration from various masters" and his picture expression of "making differences in diversified sceneries".He was also unparalleled in his detailed, clear and adorable fashion. His creative spirit and his pursuit of harmonious aesthetic realm is what we learners need today.The developing period of Wengui Yan's landscape paintings was synchronous with the second peak in the history of Chinese landscape painting. With the emergence of folk painting,the creation works of artists'was inevitably influenced by the secular world.There was full of expressions of scenes of life, places of interest and places to live in Yan's landscape paintings. The social aesthetic orientation determines the direction of the artist's paintings,and even confines the altitude of their artistic level.Working for the Imperial Painting Academy,Wengui Yan was inevitably obedient to the royal,which was the reason of the complaint of sense of secular by the later critics.Therefore, except Ding Qu who specifically followed him, successors all paid no regard to this strong-minded artist but only learned from several masters before him.But in the context of Yan's time,his creative idea was admirable and his expressive technique was worth studying.