The greatest painter of the Eastern Jin Dynasty is Gu Kaizhi, who studied the painting art of the Wei and Jin dynasties, and could not fail to mention him, at the same time, Gu Kaizhi was also the earliest painting theorist in China.
Legend has it that Gu Kaizhi had a very interesting habit when painting, that is, he never drew eyes, and later someone was very curious about this question, so he asked him why he did not draw eyes, he thought:
The four-body Yan Clam, which has nothing to do with the magic, conveys the divine portrayal and is in the midst of a blockade.
He believes that the beauty and ugliness of the human form is not the most important to the meaning of painting, and the key to conveying the spirit lies in whether people's eyes can be depicted through painting. According to his theory, people have summed up the effect of conveying the gods in painting.
Gu Kaizhi stressed in his paintings that when expressing characters, it is not only necessary to reflect the appearance and posture of the characters naturally and realistically, but also to pay attention to shaping the characters, excavating the inner depth of the characters and achieving the purpose of conveying the gods. It emphasizes the expression of the character's spiritual outlook through the eyes, and the use of the eyes to convey the spirit and character of the characters.
When depicting the characters of the Seven Sages, he realized that it was easy to wave the five strings in his hand and see the difficulty of returning to Honghong, advocating the use of artistic language to express the spiritual outlook of the characters, such as psychological characteristics, and to show these characteristics through detailed depictions, such as how to express the eyes of the characters when he painted the portrait of Yin Zhongkan with an eye disease.
At the same time, he is good at using the language of painting art to portray the psychological characteristics and spiritual outlook of the object, his paintings set off the personality and style of the characters through details, for the characters, he can carefully understand, carefully ponder, such as he painted Pei Kai portrait, added three milli, suddenly made people feel radiant, he also painted Xie Kun in the environment of the mountains, in order to show the proud character of the characters, these records can be seen his major contribution to the portrait of the characters.
His main representative works in painting include "Female Shi Zhen Tu", "Roselle Futu" and "Lienu RenzhiTu".
Although we do not yet have conclusive evidence that this is Gu Kaizhi's original handwriting, these works can reflect the painting style of the Wei and Jin dynasties at that time.
"Female Shi ZhenTu" is based on the Western Jin Dynasty Zhang Hua's literary works female Shi Zhen and painted, a total of nine paragraphs, the content is to explain and exhort some ethical and moral norms of women in the palace, in order to admonish, full of indoctrination meaning, the picture is full of life, showing the style and charm of the court women at that time, paying attention to the use of line drawing to shape, the character's line brushwork is continuous, long and natural, rich in rhythm and strength control, such as spring silkworm spit silk, flowing water, Gu Kaizhi developed the high ancient gossamer painting since the Spring and Autumn Warring States to a perfect state.
"Roselle Futu" is based on the basic clues of the development of the story as the context, "Roselle Fu" is based on the famous literary scholar Cao Zhi's "Roselle Fu" in the Three Kingdoms period. Cao Zhi created a dream realm of human-god love in the Roselle Endowment, expressing the sentimentality of his lost love.
In this painting, Gu Kaizhi shows the storyline of the characters in sections, placing them in the scenery of natural mountains and rivers to unfold, and the emotions of the characters are not conveyed through facial expressions, but are subtly displayed through the mutual relationships between the characters.
Luoshen and Cao Zhi have a love vein, but in the end, because of the difference between human gods and gods, they have to be separated, showing an irrepressible feeling of pity, showing Gu Kaizhiwu's artistic proposition of the empty god.
"Renzhitu of the Lady of The Column" follows the theme of the martyrs since the Han Dynasty, pays attention to the dynamic relationship between the characters, and shows Gu Kai's secret painting style.
Gu Kaizhi's painting theory exists in many theoretical works such as "Painting Yuntai Mountain", "On Painting" and "Wei Jinshengliu Painting Praise".
"Wei JinshengLiu Painting Praise" is gu Kaizhi's comments and expositions on the works of ancient celebrities and famous painters at that time, such as Wei Xie and Dai Kui, who emphasized the relationship between characters and the environment in this theoretical work, advocating the use of scenery to set off the status, thoughts, and emotions of the characters, advocating that the purpose of writing scenery is not simply to write scenery, but to be lyrical, for example, when he painted the portrait of Xie Kun, he used mountain scenery to set off his proud demeanor, one hill and one valley, claiming to be excessive.
The two theoretical works of "Huayuntai Mountain" and "Painting Theory" show the relationship between Gu Kaizhi in experiencing life and thinking about it, and he advocates that painters should deal with the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity when depicting objective objects, and pay attention to refining thoughts and emotions in objective entities.
He stressed that the transmission of the gods, believing that the four-body Yan Xuan was not related to the wonderful, and the portrayal of the gods was in the midst of a blockade.
This passage emphasizes the importance of conveying god, but also explains the importance of conveying god in evaluating the merits of a painting, the state of mind exists in the image of the objective entity, and through the form of expression, without form, God cannot exist, form and God are contradictory unity.
It emphasizes that while expounding and expressing the emotional temperament of the characters, it is also necessary to emphasize the importance of painting techniques, and believes that when copying, it is necessary to have a deep understanding of the original work in order to be able to reproduce it naturally and accurately.
The merit of Gu Kaizhi's painting is that he raised the general discourse of painting to the height of independent theoretical cognition, thus creating a field of ancient Chinese art theory research, which has a profound impact on future generations.
He put forward artistic theories such as the idea of moving to the magic and writing about god in shape, which became an important part of his art theory and aesthetic thought, and the pursuit of qi charm and charm in ancient painting for more than a thousand years was directly or indirectly related to his theory. Therefore, his artistic ideas, painting subjects and artistic techniques had a major influence on the development of later painting art.