The Artistic Features of Foshan Woodblock New Year Pictures

Foshan New Year pictures have the same characteristics as the folk New Year pictures in Yangliuqing, Tianjin, Taohuawu, Jiangsu, Mianzhu, Sichuan and Weifang, Shandong: in terms of themes, there are mainly auspicious patterns, exorcism, folk customs, opera stories, historical romance stories and so on. Functionally, it is mainly used to decorate the environment, render the atmosphere, and place people's desire to bid farewell to the old and welcome the new. New Year pictures are a kind of local folk art, which amuses itself, reflects the folk life and customs, and contains rich folk cultural values. However, due to different geographical, historical and economic development conditions, each place has different cultural backgrounds and social customs, and each place has strong and distinct local colors and its own strengths due to differences in appreciation habits, aesthetic tastes and modeling concepts. Influenced by Lingnan traditional culture, Foshan New Year pictures cater to the aesthetic taste and living habits of Foshan people. Most of them are folk belief maps, seasonal maps and custom maps, which are deeply loved by the people. Foshan woodblock New Year pictures draw lessons from and absorb the local folk art production techniques such as Foshan folk paper-cutting, paper dyeing, copper carving lining, block printing paper, magic clothes and spending money on door lamps. , and use red lead, green, yellow and black overprint in color to make the picture magnificent and shining. The warm and gorgeous Foshan woodblock New Year pictures not only imply auspiciousness, but also because Foshan is located in the hinterland of the Pearl River Delta, with long sunshine time in summer, hot climate, abundant rainfall and high air humidity, the scarlet and danhong produced locally in Foshan are used as the base materials of the door paintings, which makes the door paintings colorful and adds a festive and auspicious atmosphere. At the same time, gold and silver patterns are painted on the figure armor and robe belt, which enriches the picture and highlights the unique artistic characteristics of Foshan woodcut door painting.

Foshan woodblock New Year pictures are characterized by fine images, rough and concise lines, strong and powerful, full composition and rich decoration, which are obviously different from other New Year pictures. It is implicit, full of good luck, strong in the rough, strong in the personality, with strong local characteristics. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the "Zhong Yi Township Records of Foshan" recorded a "door god walk" that specialized in making door paintings, New Year pictures and statues. It can be seen that it is one of the few artistic treasures with strong local characteristics in China.

There are three kinds of Foshan woodcut New Year pictures: hand-painted, woodcut overprint and woodcut color filling, which are characterized by rough lines, bright colors, simple modeling, full composition and strong decoration. The patterns on people's clothes are rendered with smooth gold and silver lines, commonly known as "writing flowers", which is very rich in painting charm and rare for folk New Year pictures in other regions, and has become a remarkable feature of Foshan New Year pictures. In the way of expression, he is good at combining local customs and has a strong local style. Formally meet the various needs of the broad masses of the people. Foshan New Year pictures have the delicate artistic characteristics of Guangfu culture in line processing, modeling style, color setting skills and theme selection.