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He who is in harmony with nature hits the mark without effort and comprehends the truth without thinking. ----Confucius Charles Chu's painting is firmly grounded in mainstream traditional Chinese brush painting, and his subject matter is the nature around him, just as it was for his predecessors Shi Tao, Qi Baishi or Fu Baoshi: the difference is that Charles lives in Connecticut. In addition to cranes, he paints towhees, in addition to shrimp he paints Long Island Sound lobsters, his mountains are East Rock and Quechee, not Taishan and Emei, and his river is the Connecticut, not the Yangtse. The paintings form a nice homologue to Charles' own experience: just as colonists saw the land of the Pequots as "New England," so Charles sees echoes of Hebei in the Nutmeg state. The first of the "Six Principles of Painting" is: spirit resonance qiyun, and life movement shengdong. ---Xie He in Gu Huapin Lu The first character qi, signifies the life-breath of everything, be it man, beast, mountain or tree. It maybe rendered by the word spirit or spiritual, but also by the word vitality, which is a result of the activity of the spirit. If the former expression is used it must be understood that it signifies a cosmic spirit and not any kind of individualized spirit? Yun is the Chinese expression for resonance, consonance, harmonious vibrations, etc., and it is used particularly of poetic compositions in which certain parts correspond. ---Osvald Siren, Chinese Painters on Painting Chinese painters value nature for its relation to the forces and flows of natural energy. The learned man's reflections reveal those flows and forces in land, rivers, birds and flowers. In painting, it is not hard to sketch forms, but it is hard to obtain ideas. If one has an idea and works it out carefully, then the true aspect of nature is captured on a piece of silk. Isn't this extremely difficult? People may say, 'Grass and trees have no feelings, so how can there be ideas?' But they do not realize that everything in the universe has some kind of life (shengyi) and that the mystery of creation, changing and unsettled, cannot be described in forms. ---Ni Tsan Ni Tsan catches the essential intellectual challenge of Chinese painting: the idea that the scholarly painter can understand "the true aspect of nature" because he understands its life. To paint mere forms is the trick of commercial painters: the scholar paints the "changing and unsettled" life of nature. Landscape is a thing incorporating all the excellences of creation, and it is inexhaustibly protean in that it takes on different appearances in light or darkness, shade or shadows, fair or rainy weather, cold or heat, morning or evening, noon or night. Unless there are 'hills and valleys' in one's breast a vast as immeasurable waves. It is not easy to depict it. ---T'ang Hou T'ang Hou's comments could be Claude Monet's: the continuous changeableness of nature instills wonder and at the same time challenges the painter to develop his or her own soul to not only marvel but to catch nature's essence with their brush. Looking at pictures by scholars is like examining horses: one finds that they manifest the points which carry expression and life, whereas ordinary painters often grasp only the riding-whip, the hairy skin, the stable-manager, the fodder and grain but nothing of the beauty. After having seen a few feet of such pictures one feels tired. ---Su Shih Among the painters of the world, some know how to represent form, but the inherent reason of things can only be grasped by superior scholars (or gentlemen). ---Su Shih When Han Kan painted a horse, he was truly a horse. ---Su Shih Su Shih writes that only the scholar can recognize, assimilate, become the essence of the object he or she paints (he was not a great advocate of landscape painting). It's only when Han Kan became a horse that he could paint it well. In Charles Chu's painting of a tiger, his voice becomes the tiger's AWOOOO! In his painting of the Connecticut River Valley, he paints the "spirit resonance" qiyun of the valley, it's life movement shengdong, an homage to the valley, to the long line of Chinese painters, and to the great nature itself.
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