What is the role of white space in landscape painting?

In traditional Chinese painting techniques, the ancients have long suggested that leaving white space and using alum are special techniques in Chinese painting. Even the modern teaching of Chinese painting techniques also regard these two techniques as the best. Especially white space is a difficult technique. Because of the difficulty, breadth and specificity of this technique, there is no particularly well-known painter or work in the history of Chinese painting. This is obviously one of the difficult points we need to overcome.

From the point of view of alum in Chinese painting, the traditional method of making cooked rice paper, the main means is also to brush with alum water, so that the raw paper becomes cooked paper, that is, to change the ease of seepage of the raw rice paper, so that it becomes cooked rice paper is not easy to seepage. In the past, many artists painting brush painting, the use of cooked Xuan paper is this alum Xuan. Its disadvantage is that it is easy to be brittle, easy to turn yellow. After the completion of the brush painting, the whole yellowing does not seem to hinder the overall situation. I remember when I first learned Chinese painting, bought a newborn rice paper, our framing teacher warned me: if the osmosis is too fast, can not control the ink and brush, you can hang the rice paper for a period of time, after the air oxidation, slowly the paper will not be so fast osmosis, which is called the wind alum. Visible air certainly has a great influence on the painting. Ancient people in the traditional technique of alum, mainly local alum water treatment, so that it does not seep into the ink, but not many works, Fu Baoshi's wind and rain works, more than alum paintings of rain, and then rendered in ink, because of alum traces of more or less by the color of the ink cover, alum traces of change does not change the yellow is also not a big deal. It seems that if the painting with alum does not add other colors, in order to paint white and large areas of alum, there will certainly be trouble. The main raw material of rice paper is a kind of wood called sandalwood skin, after crushing and bleaching made so that the rice paper bleach and alum, coupled with a long time of air oxidation, especially seasonal changes in the dry and wet run, to the final result can be imagined. Painters want to make their works survive in the world, for their own responsibility, for the collector is responsible for, for the history is responsible for, should think about this problem.

I am in the painting of the snow scene, many years with alum to get out of the lessons learned, for which I paid a terrible price, destroyed hundreds of pieces of careful work, many paintings turned yellow, and some yellow is quite bad, the more you need to be white, the more yellow is ugly. To be sure there is no such thing as good or bad quality of alum and rice paper. I had to re-examine the choice of another path. This is the main reason why I later adopted the white method to express the world of ice and snow.

Leaving white, I said above, this is the ancients have long been proposed, that is, the highest difficulty of Chinese painting techniques, but because of its difficulty is too great, the ancients did not perfect it, especially in the performance of the vast world of snow and ice, it can be said that they are almost helpless, the only way is to use the coil, a little bit of chapping, rendering around the middle of the white, for example, the painting of the mountains that is the case.

However, now, due to the emergence of a large number of talents among painters, it proves that Chinese painting is indeed an excellent painting with great depth and unlimited potential, and at the same time, it also represents the great righteousness and tolerance of our nation. That is to say, Chinese painting is not lacking in expressiveness, but in pioneering painters. For example, the young painter Nanhai Yan's Chinese painting figures have rebuffed some people doubt the expressive power of color in Chinese painting, and the expression of the world of ice and snow is also the same, I started to use alum partially in the decades of exploration, and then when I found the consequences, abandon the use of alum, all the method of white space.

I was born in the north of Shandong Province and grew up in the south of Liaoning Province, and the geographical conditions gave me rich materials. My paintings have never left the track of Chinese painting. I express the light and shadow of nature in my paintings in a real way. In landscape painting, I mostly face nature. Observing and thinking in the depiction naturally formed my current painting style. I have studied Chinese painting for more than forty years. Brush and ink are the means to express form and reality, form for expression, brush and ink for expression. The most fascinating thing about the Guandong land is the vastness and vastness of the world of ice and snow, which should be the main characteristic of Guandong and the soul of Guandong. Chinese painting is a national painting, the expression of the local ice and snow world should be a major mainstream. Nowadays, to express the scenery of the north, everyone still recognizes that it is an important subject of Chinese painting, especially the white space, a difficult technique of Chinese painting. Practice has proved that this is the most difficult but also the best method. The more difficult the more is the value of its existence, which requires a painter's life experience, the need to dare to break through the barrier of courage, I have been determined to invest in this project, and achieved initial results, and has been recognized by many experts and encouragement, I firmly believe that the ice painting will be in the annals of Chinese painting a brand new page.