The Charm to Fly Heart and Soul

　　At the beginning of 20th century, a group of pioneers, who were the earliest people of Chinese fine arts circle in modern China to study abroad in the west, held an adoring attitude toward those fine arts works of European realism. They thought that Chinese paintings in the Five Dynasties, the Southern and Northern Song Dynasties and the Yuan Dynasty and the paintings of landscapes, figures, flowers and birds had some resemblance to realism; they also believed that the paintings of the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty mostly repeat the ancient paintings with the methods of "copying, imitating and resembling", and there was rarely original works at that times. Thus, they believed that only with realistic method can the painter give scope to his abilities, and one painter should draw paintings of his own style and not follow the set pattern of ancient people. Even Chen Duxiu, one leading figure of democratic trend of thoughts in China at that time, also said: "in order to improve Chinese paintings, it would be impossible not to adopt the realistic spirit of western paintings."

　　After reform and open up, the ontological problem of beauty and art, which was formed in the background of international communication, received unprecedented attention. A group of painters, who were masters of realistic oil paintings, suddenly started to pursue deformation. Under their influence, a large number of artists, especially the young artist, were brought to shift their attention to some ontological problems about art, such as deformation. The introduction of western trend of thoughts and the stimulation of new ideas enabled the painters to borrow experience from each other, yet still differ from each other. They pursued to display their personalities in style, and the feature of art of that time mainly represented as "innovation". For example, new material and new technique were adopted to enhance one's personal presentation and personality.

　　21th century is one epoch of knowledge economy, one epoch of digital techniques and one epoch of information exploration. Because of the big change of material and spirit, people have had much new feelings and experience, new pattern of behavior and new ideas of value. All this has constituted the base of modern art trend; works of many painters begin to represent one kind of space sense, reflecting the artists' responsibilities and ethical ideas in such a historical new age.

　　All this can't refrain from proposing one question to people: the rapid development of science and technology has gone beyond that of every age in the past and the continual change of the relation of production has continually updated people mind and ideas; although paintings experience unending and various changes through the inheritance of history, the principle of art never changes. What is the principle? The answer should be being aesthetic. Being aesthetic is the target, while all others are methods. In order to become an artist who has the sense of responsibility and the principle of art, one should deal with changeable event with unchanged method. This unchanged method is just the principle of being aesthetic, while the changeable event is to catch up with the step of time and reflect modern people's aesthetic ideal which changes with each passing day. Among modern oil painters, Dong Biachuan is such an artist that he pursues to be neither "the first one to know before others" nor"the one to go beyond others"; he takes as his principle to be aesthetic and his task to reflect the life and ethos of the time.

　　Dong Baichuan's works take realism as the base with reflecting the reality as the feature. For years, he goesdeep into some ethnic minority areas of Yunnan Province and Guizhou Province to sketch; he holds a largeamount of source material which reflects the life of ethnic minorities and creates many serial painting workswith strong ethnic minority flavor. According to the presentation of his paintings, there are four kinds of his works: one kind of works reflects the scene of daily life of ethnic minorities; one belongs to portrait; onebelongs to the small-size paintings of landscape and figures; there is still one kind belonging to screen-type figure paintings of modern women, which possess the flavor of traditional Chinese culture. Dong Baichuan is good at creating large-scale serial oil paintings, such as The Soul of Sea and Resident in Mountain. Resident in Mountain, which he creates in recent years, is very representative. In this serial paintings works, he portrays the various appearances of ethnic minorities who live in mountain of Guizhou Province. There inhabit young and pretty women, plain middle-aged peasants, faithful monks, merciful old people and many more lively and lovely children. Resident in Mountain has taken him much painstaking effort and it is created at the expense of a large amount of time, energy and arduous walking, reflecting the author's creation ideal and his determined spirit.

　　Dong Baichuan's works brighten people's eyes after seeing them. Those numerous figures of ethnic minorities that he constructs linger hauntingly in people's mind. This is one painter who is diligent to think and brave to practice. I often appreciate his paintings with thoughtful eyes that he has strong ability of painting and extraordinary ability of using lines and colors. More importantly, he understands the law and principle of creating oil paintings, and his works focus on the expression of artistic atmosphere, strengthening the spiritual implication of his works through exploring the expressive ability of painting-form language. Vasarely used to say that "artists should represent the great time", and the great time here implies that the spiritual feature of this era can be correctly expressed and represented through specific paintings. This is exactly what Dong Baichuan has been pursuing assiduously. In order to create works of modern spirit and modern grace, from the macroscopic point he profoundly grasps the theory of painting and the essence of technique, and pays attention to modern topics of contemporary fine arts circle, especially those of the creation of oil paintings, such as the conservation and change of model, the transformation of scheme, the relations between cultural connotation and regional characteristic, the change of modern people's aesthetic ideal and so on; from the microscopic point he makes many technical and technological experiments on the usage of model, scheme and colors. At the same time, he spends a great deal of effort in going to the southwest to experience life and sketch from the nature and life; many of his important works are rendered and gained on the base of his sketches.

　　Appreciating Dong Baichuan's paintings, we would feel that the picture is filled with one kind of tender and quiet atmosphere. Those smooth lines as well as those clear, refreshing and somewhat heavily-colored pictures deeply move the appreciators. His paintings are romantic, deep, unconstrained, not flippant and not shallow. He is good at controlling the degree of creating figure paintings and setting it to a proper point. In terms of the usage of color, Dong Baichuan's paintings are original and ingenious; he notices the echo between the bright and the dark and carefully handles the subtle change between the abstract and the concrete, which endow the picture with sinuate appearance resembling fluctuation and thus create one kind of musical rhythm and metre. This kind of works can withstand pondering and deliberation, and it is harmonious from general "scale" to partial "quality". From his paintings, we can feel his subtle treatment towards the relation between the cold and the warm, the contrast of brightness level and lightness level and the undemonstrative shift between various color blocks, which in all give the picture abundant changes. Although the color he uses is bright and heavy, it is never garish. The abundant figures that he paints, especially the female figures, are graceful and passionate, healthy and plain, lively and charming and deep and reserved; they are accessible and they possess the aesthetic feeling of life and the obvious mark of time. With lively brushwork, Dong Baichuan breaks the stiff and wooden creation mode of figure paintings which has always been followed and obeyed by a group of old realistic painters of last century. His works' extraordinary style in conception, composition, modeling and color really gives people an entirely new feeling. The feature of Dong Baichuan's works lies in that all his works are creations coming from life, and the real life has given him limitless inspiration. This is a painter of creative impulse and passion. His works are never simply the copy of several Pose, and there exist so much feeling that he has to the objects he describes. He merely adopts every method and every technique to represent the affection and soul of the abundant figures and the flying charm that thrills the appreciators.

　　Portraits, approximately as the close-up, constitute a high proportion of Dong Baichuan's works. Happiness is one weighty works of the author. It portrays the happiness of an old fisherman with a bamboo hat on his head at the seaside, and the concentration focuses on the close-up of his face, where the stretched brow, the sparkling joy in his eyes and the expanded smile on his weather-beaten face all give people a deep impression. What kind of happiness is it? Why does he feel happy? The sea in the background seems to be implying to us: this is the happiness of a good harvest of fishes. The author portrays the figure's face with very soft colors, while the sea is painted with cold colors and the bamboo hat with neutral colors. The subtle adoption of colors increases the three-dimensional effect of the picture and further endows the painting topic with spirit and soul.

　　In addition, the 13th of Resident in Mountain that he creates portrays a girl from the southwestern national minorities with the drizzly mountains in the distance as the background, which explains to the appreciators the identity of the girl as a resident in mountains. The girl appears to be a little childish, but her heavily frowned brows imply somewhat restrained look which can't correspond to her age. The author makes some treatment of the abstract and the concrete as well as the bright and the dark on the portraying of the girl's face; the tension on her face easily reminds people of the fact that children in mountains prematurely bear the burden of family life. It is a piece of thought-provoking painting.

　　Special praise should go to the serial figure paintings that Dong Baichuan tries to create in recent years with traditional Chinese culture as the background in order to represent the young women of China in modern times. With the tool and technique of oil paintings, he represents the old, vast, stretched and somewhat mysterious implication of traditional Chinese culture. Those pretty and elegant modern women with famous Chinese calligraphy as the background are the prefect combinations of Chinese and western cultures as well as the instructive trials of representing Chinese cultural taste with western paintings and the application of western paintings in Chinese circumstance. It is extremely commendable that an oil painting artist has focused on traditional Chinese culture with great passion. Someday, people will find that this series of works possess the significance of time; they endow people with not only a refreshing and new feeling but also one kind of adoring affection towards the prefect combination of art and ethnic culture.

　　When we examine Dong Baichuan's creation path, we can find that he is an artist who takes aestheticism as his task. He doesn't stick to the set pattern, refuses to stop making progress and refuses to pursue the so-called modern fashion. He considers it as the biggest enjoyment of art to fully express his pursuit of beauty in his heart and contribute it to the audience. He keeps on seeking and exploration on the road of modern realism.

　　The essence of esthetics is beauty. Toward beauty, different people have different artistic orientation and understanding, and there is no set principle about it. It is because there is not any principle that every one must obey that art can develop continually. As a painter and an artist who exist in a specific time, one needs neither going ahead of nor lagging behind the time. Only if his works reflect the appearance and spirit of the time he lives in and get deeply marked with the feature of the time, they belong to the excellent ones.

　　Dong Baichuan insists on his own path in realism. He has lived in Canada for years, but he refuses to follow the trite path of foreign fashion. He believes that the varied techniques and skills of artistic representation are not important, and what's important is the final effect that whether it is able to express one's feelings and whether it can arouse an echo in others' spirit. In the creation of oil painting, the first to pursue should be "excellence", but not some so-called "innovation". When appreciating a piece of works, what we value should not be "novelty", but "excellence". The reason lies in that "novelty" doesn't imply" excellence", but paintings which are excellent must be novel and there must be innovative factors in them.

　　It is a Martisse byword that "what I have been searching for is expression". Then, what does Dong Baichuan express? What he expresses is actually the most common life. There is never any "great" conception or proposition in his works, and the figures he paints don't have any shining circle around them. He just considers it as his task to express Chinese culture; he catches the moments of life and behavior of some common people living at the bottom of the society, and artistically renders them into artistic characters so as to reflect one small feature of the time.

　　Dong Baichuan's appealing paintings, which possess the charm the fly one's heart and soul, really leave a deep impression on us. From his painting works, we can sincerely feel the huge space of expression of western art, and Dong Baichuan belongs to one of the people who endow this kind of art with brand new energy.

　　(Qi Jianqiu: Chinese fine Arts Critic)