Guan Liang's Opera Ink Figure Paintings Focus on the Characters' What

Guan Liang's ink and watercolor paintings of opera figures focus on the simplicity and childlike beauty of the characters.

Guan Liang created a large number of ink and watercolor paintings of opera figures throughout his life. His works emphasize simplicity and straightforwardness, and his flat treatment of lines and colors, and he perfectly blends the traditional with the modern, and the Oriental with the Occidental. His naive and childlike modeling and brushwork, and his painstaking approach to the figure are worth studying and learning from.

In the 1920s, Guan Liang returned from his studies in Japan. Although influenced by Western modernism, as an innovator and practitioner of Chinese art, he based himself on traditional Chinese culture, boldly tried new forms of expression and possibilities, and took a unique approach to the excellent Chinese art of Peking Opera, breaking through all existing He takes Peking Opera as the theme of Chinese excellent art, breaking through all existing programs and creating ink and wash opera paintings with a brand new outlook. From Western Expressionism to Eastern Ink Painting, Guan Liang perfectly blends tradition and modernity, East and West.

Guan Liang's "Opera Paintings" are characterized by concise and vivid modeling. In his works, he uses simple shapes to depict the characters' forms and movements in a general way, and discards superfluous details in order to achieve simplicity in modeling.

Simple, evocative and interesting imagery:

Guan Liang's simple figure modeling stems from the absorption of Chinese and Western art. On the one hand, he was influenced by Western modernist painting, especially Matisse's Fauvism; on the other hand, he absorbed the best Chinese traditions. Guan Liang has made a deep and detailed study of the modeling laws of the portrait brick art of the Han Dynasty, especially the works of the Eastern Han Dynasty, abandoning the details of the carving and focusing on the overall relationship, not focusing on the accuracy of the proportion and structure, but focusing on the carving of the character's spiritual temperament and demeanor, adding to the wholeness of the modeling and the interest.

Western learning is for the body, Chinese learning is for the use, Guan Liang combines the modeling concepts of Western painting with the modeling methods of traditional figure painting to form a unique modeling language. He strives to use extremely concise figure modeling to express the rich dynamics of the figure and the interesting nature of the image.

Guan Liang studied in Japan in his early years, and received strict training in Western painting, with a solid foundation in realism. However, we find in his ink and watercolor paintings of opera characters that the artist instead pursues a kind of innocence similar to children's paintings. In terms of modeling, Guan Liang inherited the traditional imagery modeling of realistic painting and adopted the artistic techniques of exaggeration and deformation.

In his opera paintings, Guan Liang often summarizes the shape of the object with simple geometric shapes, and these large and small geometric shapes, square or round, are active in the picture, simple and vivid, rich in expressive power.