Burnt ink, also known as withered brush and exhausted ink, is an ancient painting method. It is said that jiao ink is the same as a person pushing himself to the brink of extinction to find a way to live again. Painters through the ages have regarded burnt ink as a danger in the way of painting. Since ancient times to the present day with pure jiao ink creation of Chinese painters only a few, such as the early Qing Dynasty Cheng Profound, Jin Nong, to modern Huang Binhong, Pan Tianshou, as well as contemporary Lai Shaoqi, Zhang Ding and so on. Nowadays Mr. Guan Zekai who lives in Canada, however, endures the loneliness and studies hard on the dangerous painting road, and stands out in the creation of contemporary jiao ink painting, and walks out of a "living road" of his own.
Mr. Guan Zaikai's brushwork is solid with emptiness, layers of cumulative overlap, line and ink are muddy, and he is comfortable with the use of line outlining and chapping, highlighting the line strokes in the chapping. His control of the lightness, heaviness, astringency and speed of the brush, his understanding of the structure of the ink and brush and his handling of the hierarchical space of the picture have reached the point of pure perfection. Mr. Guan's jiao ink landscapes are simple, heavy, pale and moist, reaching the highest state of jiao ink painting, which is "dry and cracked by the autumn wind, moist with spring rain". His jiao ink paintings are uniform, with a rich sense of moistness and layering, full of visual impact and shock.
"Eclectic between the East and the West, blending the ancient and the modern". Mr. Guan also has a unique approach to the application of focal ink painting. He created the "Spring" series, absorbing the Impressionist pointillism technique, allowing countless dots of color to be sprinkled on the rice paper, allowing the viewer to visually mix them, and the "Mountain Residence" series is a focal ink and light color, where the focal ink and the color blend with each other, as if they were opening up a new surface, just like a long drought and a rainy day, making the color produce a wonderful visual effect.
Black and white and reality in Chinese painting and calligraphy, just like the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang, rigid and flexible, a mountain, a tree, a point and a side are all negative yin and embrace the yang. In Mr. Guan Zekai's paintings, we can read his understanding of traditional Chinese culture and traditional Chinese philosophical thinking, and can also feel the aesthetic interest of Mr. Guan's reverence and pursuit of the Taoist method of nature, purity and simplicity, and plain and naive. This is also the reason why Mr. Guan was able to walk out of this "ink road".
For more information, please visit BEN Gallery's homepage.
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