My foundation drawing professor has always told me to explore many other styles. I tend to go into style phases that last half a year; pencil portraits of sulky introverts, line drawings of intertwined heads and elbows, symmetrical drawings of complex patterns. It never occurs to me to draw in different styles in the same month, and I never go back to what I did before.
When I looked at Wu Guanzhong's work, however, I did some quick label-memorizing and noticed that he painted in different styles across the years, going back and forth. He flitted through the history of Western art thoroughly, doing impressionism, abstract expressionism, even Egon Schiele, and good old realistic oil landscapes. Sadly the collection at SAM (though it is the largest collection of his in the world) does little justice to his ability as an oil painter, and I could only see his real skill as thumbnails online:
But at the same time, he found his way with the chinese brush.
When I looked at these, I wondered why he bothered with the rest. These houses sing. They warble with little mouths and make light "pop"s. And his consistent palette of brilliant jewel-toned greens and fuschias is fresh in chinese brush painting. With no offense meant at all, some of his abstract ink paintings could be turned into Topshop skirt prints, they were that fresh.
I guess it comes down to the age-old question of what art is. Studies and copies, even good studies, of another artist's work--not art. What Wu Guanzhong achieved with the chinese brush was something purely Wu Guanzhong. What an artist does has to be unmistakably his. His person in it, an original soul. Singing houses.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Posted by
julie
at
7/22/2009 09:35:00 PM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment