Characteristics of Lin's painting style

From 65438 to 0949, he participated in land reform in Yueqing rural area and saw Yan 'an woodcut paper-cutting. He really took paper-cutting as an artistic means to reflect real life and the spirit of the times. At that time, the paper-cuts he created to show the new life in rural areas, such as Laojun, Returning from the Fair, Busy Farming in Spring, My Sister-in-law Going to Winter School, and Harvest Season, were published in newspapers such as South Zhejiang Daily, Farmers in East China, Zhejiang Literature and Art, People's Daily and New Observation. This is his artistic career. In particular, his paper-cut "Return from the Fair" was selected for the cover of New Observation magazine, which had a great influence in Zhejiang literary and art circles. From 65438 to 0954, he was honored to attend the first Zhejiang Literature Festival, and his paper-cut works such as Spinning, Sending Rice to the Head of the Field and Letting the Chicken Go participated in the first Zhejiang Art Exhibition. Because of his outstanding creative achievements, he was transferred to Art editor 1955, a new children's newspaper founded by Zhejiang Provincial Department of Culture and Education. Soon, he was transferred to Shanghai New Youth Daily as Art editor. At this stage, paper-cut illustrations of books such as Waves, Sichuan Children's Songs, Revolutionary Red Flag All over the Mountain, and The Story of Fighting Tigers were created. Among them, Illustration of Sichuan Children's Songs won the Book Binding and Illustration Award in East China.

Beauty and magnificence are two styles of Lin's paper-cutting art. He was born in a water town in the south of the Yangtze River, where not only the scenery is beautiful, but also the paper-cutting is as delicate and gentle as folk songs and tea-picking songs. This is the local style of Lin's paper-cutting. However, when he saw the northwest paper-cutting, he was even more fascinated by the simple and rough paper-cutting, just like a trip to heaven. His later paper-cutting is more of this bold and simple style, such as the generalization of image, the thick and wide red color, the taste of edge cuts and so on. It is far from the local paper-cutting style in Jiangnan. It should be said that Lin's paper-cut art basically represents the new level of folk art development in the fifties and sixties. He transformed the traditional paper-cut with folk customs into a new paper-cut that can express real life and reflect the spirit of the times.

For Lin personally, paper-cutting not only brought him artistic fame and influence, but also became a wind sign for him to go to the hinterland of art, because his artistic pursuit in paper-cutting and the prototype of some artistic styles directly affected the formation of his personal appearance in China in the future. For example, what he pursues in paper-cutting is the embodiment of his rough and bold pen and ink, and the connotation of beauty and gentleness; For another example, the concise and general language required by paper-cutting is also the vigorous and simple style of his Chinese painting; For example, his local feelings in paper-cutting constitute the theme he shows in Chinese painting figures and landscapes. Indeed, his figures and landscapes rarely show the feelings of being born like traditional literati paintings, but are full of his love and attachment to the Jiangnan countryside where he once lived.

During this period of artistic transformation, on the one hand, he tried to integrate folk New Year pictures and paper-cuts into Chinese paintings, such as Cut Window Flowers, Love Peach and Happy Lantern Festival created by 1962. Although the tools of Chinese painting were used, the language form was still the flavor of New Year pictures. On the other hand, his figure paintings have also turned to the expression of realistic themes, such as Steelmaker, Rest in the Field after Customers Leave, Planting Melons in Mulberry Shade and Picking Zongzi. Influenced by his paper-cut modeling, these figure paintings are concise and summarized, which is not the way of academic sketch modeling at all, but the backrest to change the tradition. In particular, works such as "Rest in the Field" and "Planting Melons in Mulberry Shades" that express local life are dignified with pens, but they are very rich in meaning.

From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, he went to Jiangxi, Anhui, Shanxi, Sichuan, Yunnan, Guangxi, Hainan, Henan, Guizhou and other places to sketch, with footprints all over Huangshan, Emei, Shilin, Huashan, Guilin, Songshan, Yandang, Jinggangshan and Lushan, and on the Yangtze River, Yellow River, Xin 'an, Wujiang River, Chishui, Jinsha River and Lijiang River. Compared with his creation, his landscape sketch retains many natural features of landscape, especially the treatment of some rocks, which is subtle and appropriate and full of turning points. The combination of pen and ink and landscape forms is also very natural, and the use of ink is calm, moist and thick, which fully shows the painter's solid skill in expressing natural landscape forms with pen and ink. It can be said that sketching from the scene not only created conditions for his pictures to absorb the fresh weather and artistic conception of natural landscapes, but also found a basis for his pen and ink to further break away from tradition. A large number of his landscape works are extracted from these personal feelings, such as Gathering Trees on the Shujiang River, Mountainous Areas in Southern Anhui, Riverside of Jinsha River, Huashan Map, Peak Height in Hua Yue, Summer in Kwai Township, Poyang Lake, Storm in Mountain Pond, Mountains on Plateau and Castle Peak after Rain. These works always combine scenes of people's daily life with descriptions of mountains and rivers. For example, the mechanized farming in summer in Kwai's hometown, the shuttle transportation of orange in Dongting and the return of fishing boats in the twilight of Poyang Lake all show the life-oriented turn of modern landscape in that period. The brushwork of these works also appears calm and vigorous. The brushwork mostly uses rocks to reach the front, ink lines are exchanged, and ink colors are used together, which enhances the heavy feeling and spiritual expression of the brushwork.

His works also began to show a tendency of extreme simplification. For example, Autumn Color (1977), Wine Return (1977), Spring Color on the Lake (1973), Castle Peak after Rain (1974) and Flower Moon Hero (660) In "Flower Moon Hero", the painter almost uses a distant mountain to compose the whole article, which is a pile of thin ink, showing his cleverness and preciseness in using his pen. The narrowing and flattening of the picture composition highlights the structural nature of the basic mountain shape. The "Wine Carrying Map" was all written with wet ink blocks, and a boat carrying wine was rowed out of the reed pond. The composition of this work is not only simple, but also the reed represented by large light-colored ink blocks is extremely abstract. The simplicity of Lin's works shows his interest in abstract structures hidden in natural images. It is this abstract structure that formed the peak of his landscape painting in the 1980s, and he emphasized the positive role of visual forms in modern landscape painting in the 20th century.

In the 1980s, Lin's landscape stick-and-ink style had two painting methods, one was stick-and-ink landscape, the other was stick-and-ink landscape. Lijiang River, Lijiang River after the rain, sailing boats on the river, green hills on Lu 'an, after the rain clears, sleeping at night, bells deep in the mountains, thousands of people and bamboo, hometown and so on. They are all works that best represent his landscape style with simple strokes and thick ink. The so-called "simple pen" is to describe the overall structure, framework, momentum and charm of landscape paintings with simple and clear big strokes and ink blocks. Replace the traditional meticulous brushwork of rocks with large brush and ink blocks, abandon details and grasp the visual whole. Therefore, large format is very important in Lin's landscape painting, or the form of large format is the primary and final problem of Lin's conception of landscape painting, and it is an important feature of his landscape painting style. The so-called "thick ink" means that his "simple pen" is not presented in the form of lines, but in the form of large ink blocks. His landscapes often use a lot of light ink or thick ink to sweep ink, or ink breaks water, or water breaks ink, forming a mutual penetration and watertight pen and ink meaning. "Thick ink" is not dry ink, burnt ink or thirsty ink, but thick ink that is water-permeable, moist and permeable, and is covered with the beauty and agility of water. "Thick ink" is not splashing ink, but a thick ink that stirs water infiltration, hydration and water infiltration with pen power, pen nature, pen speed and pen meaning. In Lin's works, dry pen and flying white are only used as a contrast in ingenious places and are extremely precious. Lin's landscape paintings not only highlight the abnormal structure with simple strokes, but also blindly use wet ink and thick ink, which contradicts the traditional concepts of "advocating pen" and "ignoring ink", showing Lin's courage and boldness in exploration and creation. In fact, his creativity is not unreasonable. The structure is simplified, which is the basic law he got from the paper-cut modeling. Wet ink comes from his unique experience and love for the mountains and rivers in the south of the Yangtze River, especially after the rain, so most of his landscapes are written in the rain or seem to be soaked by water after the rain. Thick ink and heavy ink are not only his favorite twilight seclusion, but also the spirit he got from the broken ink of Huang. In fact, stick figure and thick ink are inseparable. Thick ink can only be reflected and publicized through the spirit of stick figure, and stick figure can only present the structure and momentum of mountains and rivers in the picture through thick ink.

Green Bamboo Grove, Spring in Shuicheng, Landscape in Zhu Mo, Sunset, Harvest Season, Autumn Return, Luming Literature in the Deep Mountain, Scenery of Hainan, Poems by Ouyang Xiu and Qi of Huang Shanyun are the works that can best reflect his landscape style of stick figure and rich colors. This kind of works seems to be based on the simple and thick ink all the way, which transforms the thick ink into colored ink: on the one hand, color is treated as ink, although it is color, it still embodies the spirit of freehand brushwork, and color presents a stagnant, thick, moist and childish meaning through freehand brushwork; On the other hand, through the use of pens, color and ink naturally blend together. Color and ink are not auxiliary and main relations, but complementary. In Lin's stick figure and heavy ink painting style, color also bears the structural role of the picture. For example, "Landscape in" and "Never" are all drawn with solid colors, which makes the color very expressive. And some works, such as Bamboo Forest and Poems by Ouyang Xiu, are as moist and elegant as light ink. Generally speaking, the landscape with simple brushwork and colorful ink makes the landscape of Lin more interesting in life and more fresh and lively in artistic conception.