Study On The Characteristics Of Contemporary Realistic Ink Figure Paintings

With a wide view of the history of Chinese painting, it can be concluded that the realistic wash figure paintings appeared rather late, and the traditional scholars'paintings gave priority to freehand brushwork. These paintings are attached with refreshing colors and the contracted and elegant strokes, with consideration to artistic moods and ink interest. The figure paintings showed up before Dang Dynasty. The strokes were untrammeled, and the figures in the paintings were contracted. But the majorities were fine brushworks, following the painting style of"describing spiritual quality in form."With the appearance of Liang Kai's splash-ink drawing in the Song Dynasty, it opened up one way for freehand brushwork and paved way for wash figure paintings. Chinese traditional figure paintings also receive some influence from philosophical notions which stress romantic charm, not appearance likeliness. Thus the styling was simplified and became accorded with the expressive approach for scholars to give vent to their emotions. But these divorce from realistic society, unable to reflect the realistic life. This copy of ancient painting style lasted until it was altered in post-Qing Dynasty. Since 20th century, the realistic wash figure painting was affected by new ideas and notions with the several social transformations, and made brilliant achievements. The realistic wash figure painting was pushed to a new development phase. Especially after the May 4th New Culture Movement, Kang Youwei, Cai Yuanpei and Chen Duxiu claimed to study and introduce the western realism and altered the traditional concepts and theories. Then the realistic wash figure painting with modern consciousness came into being. On the behalf of Xu Beihong and Jiang Zhaohe, the reformists melted the western strict modeling concepts and the theory of drawing perspective into Chinese wash figure paintings. On the basis of remaining the traditional materials such as pen, ink, paper and the ink features, the reformation and innovation played a decisive role in the rehabilitation and development of Chinese realistic wash figure painting, and a whole teaching system of realistic wash figure painting was formed. After the founding of New China, the realistic wash figure paintings became flourishing as never before and made rapid progress, resulting in the appearance of older generation of realistic wash figure painters such as Huang Zhou, Fang Zengxian and Liu Wenxi. The contemporary capable young painters such as Li Baian, He Jiaying, Tian Liming, Ren Huizhong, Chen Jueming and Bi Jianxun, plunged into life, based on the reality, followed the pulses of the time. They devoted their emotions to the creation, adopted new painting ingredients, inherited and innovated on the matter of stroke methods and ink methods. Thus, the contemporary realistic wash figure painting bears amazing fruits.Although the contemporary realistic wash figure paintings took on a sense of prosperity, under the influence of co-existence of multicultural situation, problems exist. Public's aesthetic patterns make some changes and the paintings should adapt to these changes. But although realistic wash figure paintings borrowed the western painting concepts, and absorbed western drawing, perspective and color, and made the modeling more accurately, the traditional ink ecstasy was lost, the result is that the painting is stiff and rigid, with no vivid natural change of ink and no enjoyment to appreciators. It deserves more researches on how to combine the western realism and abstraction with Chinese traditional ink elements, on maintaining the Chinese traditional ink moods and modeling accuracy, on changing the traditional ink-focused pattern. So it is necessary to reconstruct the contemporary realistic wash figure painting teaching and composing system. Only in this way can Chinese realistic wash figure painting gain development.