What are the style characteristics of Li Keran's landscape paintings?

Li Keran's landscape paintings attach importance to the cohesion of images. He emphasized that landscape painting should be created from scratch, from existence to nothingness, from simplicity to richness, and then from richness to simplicity.

His landscape works in the 1940s still have the shadow of Zhu Da and Dong Qichang. They are unpretentious and have a linear brush-and-ink structure.

After 1950s, with the help of sketch, the works created a new landscape image, which changed from a linear pen-and-ink structure to a blocky pen-and-ink structure, with ink as the main part, and the whole was simple and rich, heavy and profound.

He absorbed nutrition from Fan Kuan, Gong Xian, Huang and other ancient and modern masters, and created a completely different style of Piaomao Shenxiong. Most of his materials are drawn from Jiangnan and Bashu famous mountains and rivers, thus melting and casting the quietness and beauty in his painting style. His simplicity and mellow northern quality make his style simple and profound. And the light is introduced into the picture, especially good at showing the backlight effect between morning and evening in the mountains, which makes the work have the characteristics of hazy confusion and streamer wandering. Generally speaking, Li Keran's landscape paintings are closer to the perceptual reality of the object than those of Ming and Qing Dynasties, which weakens the independence of meaning and form and interest in a certain sense. This is a correction and breakthrough to the tendency of landscape painting becoming more and more formal and stylized since Ming and Qing Dynasties, which is consistent with the literary trend of thought that pays attention to realism since May 4th Movement.

Li Keran has been a professor of Chinese painting department of Central Academy of Fine Arts for a long time, and has trained many landscape painters. He believes that the first step in learning traditional painting must be to type with the greatest skill, and the second step must be to type with the greatest strength. This is a summary of his decades of artistic practice, and also reflects his overall view on tradition and creation. He has published Li Keran's Ink Sketch, Li Keran's Chinese Painting and Li Keran's Painting of Cattle.