Artistic characteristics of brick carving in Linxia

Linxia brick carving has been innovating for nearly a thousand years, enduring for a long time. In modern times, it absorbed the advantages of painting and woodcut and got greater development. Widely used in temples, gardens and residential buildings, the decorative parts include screen walls, barriers, gatehouses, ticket gates, stilts, walls, roofs and mountain flowers. Brick carving has a wide range of genres, mostly with good wishes as the content, including pine, cypress, plum, bamboo, flowers and so on; There are pine cranes, magpies, birds, squirrels and deer; More are wood-like arches, sparrows, purlins, grass rolls, patterns and so on. The forms of expression are rich and colorful, some are magnificent, some are elegant and generous, and the paintings are intentional and meaningful.

Brick carving products are mainly used to decorate temples, temples, temples and deep houses in residential buildings. They are usually used for patios, gables, shadow walls, gallery walls, danlou, steps, low thresholds, Liu Mi left, roofs, etc. Sculpture themes can be divided into natural scenery, social life and decorative patterns with national characteristics. Brick carving in Linxia absorbed carving techniques such as wood carving, stone carving and jade carving, and at the same time paid attention to the integration of artistic expressions such as Chinese painting, calligraphy, seal cutting and poetry with brick carving techniques to form diversified artistic characteristics, which not only retained the simplicity and simplicity of unique materials, but also presented diversified artistic characteristics.

Now in Linxia, you can also see many treasures of brick carving. Previously, there was a brick sculpture of "Three Views of the Black Dragon" in the Ming Dynasty on the screen wall of Huaqing Temple in the Eight Sides of Linxia Mosque. In addition, Dongfu, located on the east side of Bafang Sandao Bridge in Linxia City, is a gathering place for brick carvings in Linxia. There are hundreds of brick carvings of different sizes on the zhaobi, veranda and stigma of this official residence, including more than one independent scroll 10, including grapes, peony, lotus, maple leaf Qiu Jutu, banana, bamboo moon and pine moon, among which the most famous ones are

Brick carving in Linxia can be divided into kneading and carving from the production process. The so-called kneading, first of all, is to knead the carefully prepared mud into various shapes with hands and molds, and then put it into a kiln for firing. Most of these works are independently shaped, such as dragons, phoenixes and unicorns. , mostly used for roofs, commonly known as echinoderms. The so-called carving is to carve various patterns on the selected and fired blue bricks with a carving knife, which is much more complicated than kneading. A pattern is often made up of dozens or even dozens of blue bricks, carved on the mud kiln cotton bricks and carved with a knife. This method is often used for wall decoration and steps of buildings. The carving process includes eight processes: grinding, composition, carving, fine grinding, watering, numbering, splicing and installation, and decoration. Manufacturing tools include folding ruler, saw, planer, shovel, chisel, carving knife, etc. Among them, shovel, chisel and carving knife are divided into several types according to the technological requirements such as weight, size, length and blade width.

Linxia brick carving adopts the technique of combining carving with hollowing out, or round carving or semi-round carving, which makes it jump out of the picture with distinct layers and strong three-dimensional sense. Secondary parts and background scenes are embossed. In conception, the combination of realism and romanticism is adopted to express feelings in the scene and integrate the scene.

Its carving techniques mainly include negative line carving, concave line carving, convex line carving, shallow relief, high relief, hollow through carving and so on. This is the essence of Linxia brick carving art, a brick carving is often composed of three or four layers of patterns, overlapping, echoing and seamless, with a strong three-dimensional sense. Brilliant creativity and exquisite carving workers have vividly reproduced vivid pictures and vivid tastes on a few blue bricks, which is amazing. Now the main inheritors of Linxia brick carving are Zhou Jingde and Zhan.

In Linxia, brick carving, as a building material, is mostly embedded in the center of the side wall of brick-wood structure, under the eaves of the gable front wall, in the center of the courtyard shadow wall, and also built on the roof, which is a manual work of art specially used to decorate brick walls. Linxia brick carving not only has independent ornamental value, but also integrates with the whole building. It is elegant and refined, with strong interest in life, strong imagination and expressive force.