What is an excellent painting?
Dear friends,
There are a few basic guidelines to determine an excellent painting:
A. Liveliness -- Some say there are two kinds of music -- one alive and one dead. The same is true with painting. Some are too stiff and others are too lively. The six-method advocated by Hsieh Ho of the 4th century Nan Chi period is rather old fashion. His last method, "Rhythmic vitality", is actually a painting's general expression, not a method. However, we can still use rhythmic vitality to judge a painting's whole impression -- good or bad. A painting's liveliness depends on its whole structure with all the parts closely coordinated. A painting looks alive if it has a healthy arrangement. If it is orderly but has variations it will draw people's attention and hold everlasting interest.
B. Ya and Su (elegance/refinement) -- In any society, we have refined gentlemen and scoundrels. In painting, we also have different likes and dislikes between a piece of commercial art and a piece of fine art. Ya means noble, natural, honest, generous, elegant, carefree and straightforward. Su means common, unrefined, coarse, pretentious, superficial, confine and shallow. Both ya and su are related to a painter's temperament and personality. For example, a college student and street gang member both wear expensive designer outfits --- but one can easily differentiate their own class based on their speech and mannerism. A refined painting and a fraudulently decorative picture can be as easily differentiated. Anyway, no matter how ornamental a painting appears, if it looks su, it has no artistic value.
C. Personality -- If art is a creation, it solely depends on each artist's personality and creativeness. Every painting must show the creator's clear appearance. In Picasso, Matisse, Chaggall and Modigliani's works, one can immediately recognize the individual painter at a glance. Unfortunately for the Chinese, they learned painting by copying the old masters' works for thousands of years. As a result, all paintings look more or less the same from generation to generation -- like a thousand people have the same face -- not much progress. Painters like Ba- Da-Shan Jen, Shi Tao, Wu Chang-Shuo and Qi Bai-Shi, however, still show strong personalities in their paintings. These masters are good examples of personality in painting.
D. Composition -- Composition is organizing a painting. Good organization generally must have rules and regulations -- vertical force and horizontal direction. If too orderly, for example if the theme of the painting is placed in the middle like a target, then the audience will concentrate their sight only in the middle, neglecting to see the four sides of the painting and missing the wholeness of the art work. How the brushes and colors are used is extremely important. This we will discuss at a later date.
The reason I choose Matisse's Dance to illustrate this article is to show the lively movement in the picture. The color field in the painting (applying colors in a flat way) is his creation. It vividly demonstrates the contrast between "cold" and "hot" colors. This kind of masterpieces certainly belongs in a museum because one can never grow tired of looking at it.
-- Kwo Da-Wei