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One day his eyes brightened when he ascended a small hill. The panoramic approach he took to his subsequent work, Lu Xun’s Hometown, was a great success. A concentration of white-washed walls and gray-tiled roofs dominates the center of the painting, made prominent by the vast and grayish waters around it that drift out to mingle with the sky. A grayish-green grove in the foreground somewhat blocks the view of rows upon rows of gray roofs, leaving room for imagination. However, a gray wall and a white house in the lower-right corner carry forward the cluster of civilian residences, establishing a connection between the ash-gray waterways and houses in the center of the painting, then redirecting the attention of the viewer to the aerial background in the upperleft corner. The final effect is of vastness and isolation. Most of Wu Guanzhong’s southern watertown landscapes concentrate on a particular scene, and such panoramic depictions as Lu Xun’s Hometown are rare; this is celebrated as his realistic masterpiece of the 1970s.

Color is also important in capturing and presenting the mood of a landscape. Wu Guanzhong was a master of the Impressionist’s pallet, but he abstained from emphasizing the characteristic play of contrasting light and shadow which dominates that genre, believing it too intense to reflect the mood of Chinese landscapes. Wu instead deployed techniques and shades of pastels to create the effect of what he described as a “semi-cloudy sky.” This trait set him apart from the Impressionist school. Wu’s brilliant use of space also became part of his trademark. His large blocks of white and black are clearly in the ink-and-wash language.

Chinese-style Sketching

Wu Guanzhong advocated that landscapes should be based on preliminary sketches. Unlike Western artists however, he did not select a particular scenic perspective for his work. Wu believed in traditional Chinese composition techniques for landscapes, requiring the artist to first tour around the site while composing the picture in his/her mind or in a sketch book. Locations might shift several times before the painting was actually started. Variation of perspectives is one of the main distinctions identifying the traditional Chinese landscape. Wu described this method as “selecting iron ores in the mountains and smelting and tempering them along the way.”

When sketching A Mountain Village in Guilin, he found the distant mountains and the trees in the foreground made an exceptional composition, but their range of darker or lighter green hues seemed a bit monotonous. So he placed white-walled and gray-roofed houses between the mountains and groves, effectively breaking the color homogeneity and infusing the picture with an animated quality. When creating his Fresh Bamboos along the Lijiang River, he also switched perspectives repeatedly and recombined different angles into a balanced composition.

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VOL.59 NO.12 December 2010 Advertise on Site Contact Us