¡@¡@
|
Fan K¡Šuan, a native of Shensi
province, often traveled the area between the capital and Loyang. Although
he was known for his magnanimous character, upright personality, as well
as fondness of drink and the Way, he is renowned for landscape painting.
In his early study of painting, he followed the style of the Shantung
artist Li Ch¡Šeng (919-967). Later, however, he came to realize that if
he really wanted to portray the land, he had to take Nature as his teacher
rather than other artists or their works. After all, landscape exists in
nature and in the mind of the artist. Fan K¡Šuan thereupon went to Mt.
Hua and secluded himself among the forests and mountains, devoting himself
to observing the effects of atmospheric, weather, and seasonal changes on
the scenery. Therefore, contemporaries praised him for being able to
commune with the mountains. This sole surviving masterpiece is a testament
to his skills and ideas in landscape painting.
The clusters of vegetation
at the top of the tall mountain are actually distant forests clinging to a
precarious perch. Running along the central axis of the scroll, the
central mountain dominates the scene in a classic example of Northern Sung
monumental landscape painting. The rooftops of a building complex stand
out in the right middleground. By the cluster of rocks in the right
foreground is a path on which a mule train makes its way. A cascade as
slender as silk falls from the heights above, ending up as the stream
rushing down in eddies towards the foreground. From near to far, Fan
K¡Šuan has described with realistic detail the solemn grandeur of a
majestic landscape.
Fan K¡Šuan rendered the
mountains and slopes with jagged outline strokes and filled them with
brush dabs resembling raindrops--techniques which highlight the monumental
and eternal features of the mountains. To the right of the mule train,
among the leaves, is the signature of Fan K¡Šuan, a final touch by the
artist to suggest the insignificance of man (including himself) compared
to Nature.
¡@ |