Study On The Oil Painting Of Yan Wenliang

Wenliang Yan is a famed art educator and oil painter in modern China. He devoted his whole life to art education and oil painting creation, and enjoyed great reputation in Chinese art circle. The analysis from this article is mainly based on Wenliang Yan’s oil painting works, and discuss the style, the era’s characteristics, the root of his works, and the influence on Chinese oil painting from the cross features of the west and the east in his works. Most of his early works are of exquisite and realistic style, which is colorful and vivid. In portraying object, Wenliang Yan is adept in fathoming the light changes on the image of objects. The structure of his paintings is in pursuit of the combination of precision, vividness and harmony. In 1928, Wenliang Yan entered Paris Supreme Art College to receive canonic education. In the period, Yan had been deeply influenced by French Impressionistic art, thus his works represented a style of impressionism, which concentrated on color changes of objects in the sunlight. When studying in French, Yan toured Italy and other countries and created many works. These works reflects fully Yan’s understanding of natural light and color, and are filled with comparison of the same hues and the different hues. In the subtle differences among colors, the works look for a representation of the vividness of the image of objects. The strokes in those works are highly precise but with some bold outlines. The colors used are bright and gorgeous. And a technique called “color point” was applied to represent impression of obects and an atmosphere of colors in the sunshine, which looks like in a mess. After coming back to China, Yan’s works combined colors used in the context of impressionism with those used in the context of realism, and he was good at summing up rules in the process of painting. In this period, he wrote a book named Talking about Colors, which results from his research on light and colors in oil paintings. There is relatively thorough research, in that era, on the colors used in the context of impressionism in the book. He created a complete unity of national feelings with Chinese characteristics and impressionistic technique from the west. Yan’s late works are more complete and vivid, with bright and natural colors, which combine paintings from the west and the east. In conclusion, in Yan’s early works, his insist on the style of realism laid the foundation for the representation of the style of impressionism when he studied in French. It seems that his art style and the style of the impressionism reached the same goal by different means since he had persisted in realism. When Yan returned to China, there has been a downward trend for the style of impressionism in his works, while in which the colors and the form used were close to the style of realism. Those works are exhibited for people in the form of what people dote on. In originally belongs to the western painting language of oil paintings, YanWenLiang add Chinese culture elements in paintings, let his works have their own unique painting language. YanWen Liang lifelong learning, creation experience of nearly, modern Chinese painting field has important influence.