Wu had a particular interest in sketching trees and worked hard to refine his trees. “I love trees because they seem human, particularly the leafless trees of winter, which are like naked women and exude moods of sadness or joy,” Wu once said. Western painters often use patches of color to render leafy trees as if painting cauliflowers, while Chinese artists resort to lines to reflect their lineal, skeletal beauty. Wu admired ancient artists Guo Xi (1023-a.1085), Li Tang (1066-1150) and Ni Zan (1301-1374) in particular for their depiction of trees, which he praised as “precise and humanistic, at a level that is rarely achieved by Western artists.”

Tashilumpo Monastery was Wu’s 1961 masterpiece. In the background are mountains and temples, and in the foreground rows of trees; those in the first row are all leafless, but Wu used his lineal techniques to reflect vivid attitudes. He was meticulous in arranging the lines, so viewers would feel the density and naturalness of the trees they represent.

Wu’s artistic experience told him, “Pencil sketches and ink-and-wash are near perfect for depicting trees, but sticky oil paint makes it difficult to define the subtleties of branches and twigs.” Then he found inspiration in ancient Greek pottery – those dancing lines scraped into a thick layer of base color, just as we see in Matisse’s oils. Wu used a spatula to scrape lines or strips on a thick background of paint and apply colors into the grooves to make them stand apart from the base. The result was the spidery lines he favored. To describe the tips of trees, he used the point of a spatula to scratch fine, curved lines without applying another layer of color. He confessed: “I often used such techniques to represent woods and curving twigs – again, an effect hardly achievable with an oil brush.”

However, some Chinese artists trained in Russia refused to acknowledge Wu’s works as “authentic oils” or the special properties that mark Wu’s oil painting innovation and success. In the opinion of Russian artists, southern Chinese scenery is not suitable for the medium of oil, but by then Wu had filled this blank in the Chinese oil landscape.

Modernization of Ink-and-Wash

In the 1970s, Wu started to dabble in the ink-and-wash genre, often doing the motif in oil first and then rendering it in ink and wash. Assessing the two techniques, he effectively applied the oil-manipulating experience to his new departure. He also excelled at using the painstaking pointillist approach as well as lines and color blocks; his intellectual and technical toolkit was robust, the better to reflect the poetic beauty of nature and the empathy of the artist. His ink-and-wash works appeal both to traditional Oriental aesthetics and those with more modern artistic sensibilities.