1. Sound of the Flute

　　I felt a sense of familiarity and nostalgia when I looked at Hometown Scenery, a painting by the then 14-year-old Huang Tieshan. When I was that age, I had also painted scenes from my hometown. Remarkably, the scenes are almost identical: an arched stone bridge rests across a stream. The tall building at one end of the bridge is the Wen-Chang Pavilion or the Temple of the Dragon King. The other end is the pier and on the pier are stilt houses often seen in southwestern Hunan. The backdrop is the mountain. I could almost see the teenager Huang TieShan walk out of the painting with a bamboo flute strapped to his waist. He walked out of the town of Shanmeng, walked out of DongKou County, and walked out of the Xue-Feng Mountain. The melody of the flute played on as each note morphed into colors of the rainbow. He walked along the Xiang River and continued on to the Yangtze River. The sound of the flute remained as the teenager turned into a young man. He continued to walk and walked all over Hunan, all over China, until he reached the whole world. The young man reached his prime and time carried him into his seasoned years. The sound of the flute persisted and remained clear. In my impression, watercolor painting is very similar to the sound of the flute. Oil painting is the piano and Chinese water-ink painting is the zither. A piano is characterized by its overwhelming power that comes along only with a reining sovereign. A zither, however, is more like a hermit indulging in the beauty of mountains and brooks. What about the sound of the flute? The sound of the flute comes from the pastoral ballad played by the shepherd. The shepherd is a born aesthete. Who can love and appreciate beauty more than the shepherd? His pasture abounds with picturesque scenes. The grass is green, the dew is thick, the mountain is lush, and the stream flows by. Birds can be heard chirping cheerfully from the trees and in the distance the chimney smoke floats carelessly on the wind. I love the carefree shepherd who leisurely watches the clouds drift and effortlessly blows his flute. When you look at Huang Tieshan's watercolor paintings, you become a shepherd. Inside every scene resides the sound of the flute, which lingers in the landscape and echoes in your heart. At this time, I really want to cry out “Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!”

　　2. Serenity

　　“Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!” Dr. Faust also blurted out and loud in 18th century Europe. Mentally fatigued by the mysticism of the Middle Ages and the painstaking reasoning at his study, Dr. Faust had a brief stay at the pristine valleys and was inevitably captivated by the beauty of nature. Where to find deeper beauty and greater harmony than those of nature? Isn’t the ultimate mission of an artist to exquisitely preserve the elapsing beauty through verses, musical notes and colors? Nevertheless, people tend to ignore a simple truth like this. Man remains enraptured in the hallucinations produced by his mind and presumptuously desires to produce more profound images than those by nature. To challenge the harmony and beauty represented by the order of nature, man concocted mythical characters and far fetched power, which he considers intense but lead to his own delusion.

　　Therefore, when I walked into the Southwest Hall of the National Art Gallery of China and caught sight of works of Huang Tieshan, like when Dr. Faust rambled into the vale strewn with wild flowers, I could not help but cry out: “Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!” It has been so long since I witnessed such beauty and purity.

　　What is captured by a photographer is a “decisive instant.” An instant of one 500th of a second can change a person’s outlook of the world.

　　What is captured by the watercolor paintings of Huang Tieshan is a poetic space, not necessarily striking the viewers with its grandeur, distance or depth, but overflowing with poetic sentiment. It is as if every ray of sunshine, every reflection in the water, every rock, and even every quivering branch of a tree under the sky was immersed with the fluid texture of a verse, reaching the viewer’s heart through osmosis, where a pure, clear and nurturing territory of poetry was reclaimed. I strolled by Huang Tieshan’s paintings, which were quietly hanging on the whitewashed wall, as if I was opening one beautiful window after another. Images mirroring the superb state of mind of great Chinese poets were presented to my eyes in their vividness, which have brought solace to the spirit and soul of our nation for over a thousand years. I was touched by the excitement of Xie Lingyun when caught in a surprise by the sprouting grass in the pond; I sympathized with Li Bai’s affection for the autumn moon over Mount E-Mei; I sensed Du Fu’s refreshed mind at the sight of the sunrise at the Kuimen Gorge; I felt Meng Haoran’s melancholy at the sound of the raindrops and falling petals; I perceived the serenity surrounding Wan Wei when listening to birds chirping in a secluded mountain; I admired Liu Yuxi’s solitude when beholding a lonely stork in the cloudless sky. It is in such beautiful and pure poetic state of mind that our nation has opened her heart to nature, allowing our spirit and soul to be restored with clarity and sensitivity. “All rivers on the earth mirror the same moon, all clouds over the earth float under the same sky.” A discerning heart discovers the natural and unspeakable beauty everywhere and is apt to trigger compassions through its own sensitivity. Comparable to the wideness of the sky, the big heart of an artist is willing to embrace all creations in nature.

　　When I first met Huang Tieshan and chatted with him, I was most impressed by his serenity. The art represented and produced by a man of serenity radiates peace, which is the sublime state of mind for an artist.

　　3. Watercolor

　　Watercolor has been the first love of every young artist embarking on painting. When beginners start showing strong interest in colors and objects, their parents will probably purchase for them a watercolor paint set, a palette in the shape of a chrysanthemum and sheets of white paper. Then, like a trained artist, the learners will pour clear water into a cup and dip the soft brush into the water. After mixing the paint in the wells of the palette, several casual brushes will form a colorful image on the white sheet, which in most cases give both starters and their parents a shock: What a genius!

　　Yes, almost all masters began with this first attempt. A master and an amateur differed little when they chose watercolor as a medium into painting.

　　However, for many artists, water color would become their first love. As they grew and matured, the artists developed passions for other medium, such as oil painting, printmaking, traditional Chinese water-ink painting, and sculpture with which to produce their masterpieces, possibly bringing fame.

　　Very few artists were able to sustain their first love like Huang Tieshan did. There can be many explanations for his life long bond with watercolor. But I think the best reason is Huang Tieshan’s perfect communion with watercolor.

　　For most watercolorists, building such a communion is difficult. After all, watercolor is bound by limitations of its own vocabulary and therefore may lack the depth in depiction and expression.

　　It seems predestined that watercolor retains its characteristic bud-like delicacy and water-like clarity. If an artist’s heart becomes old with age and experience, he will no longer remain satisfied with the purity and tenderness of watercolor. He has two options; to give watercolor a seasoned look or to develop a passion for a different mode of painting. A seasoned look will ruin watercolor. An interest in something else will force the artist to bid farewell to watercolor. Eventually, artists may develop a bias against watercolor: neither an elderly nor middle aged artist should choose watercolor.

　　Why? It is because water and pigments make up the principal part of watercolor painting.

　　With pigments and oil as its principal ingredients, oil painting is characterized by the thickness and the sculpturability that come along with the covering power of its material. With knives and brushes, an oil painter may scrape off or build up the paint, which allows increased depth in depiction. Using pigments of superior saturation and stability, oil painting surpasses watercolor and renders more intensity of artistic representation.

　　The principal components of Chinese water-ink painting are water and ink. As vehicles for painting, ink produces a more abstract, sedimentary, subjective, and intellectual touch than pigments. With lines and profiles of Chinese calligraphy, the combination of water and ink allowed the Chinese water-ink painting to stand out as a medium for expressing the artist’s spontaneous thoughts. In expressing personality and character, it is hard for watercolor to compete with Chinese water-ink painting.

　　Consequently, many middle aged Chinese artists have fallen in love with oil painting and many elderly Chinese artists have become attached to water-ink painting.

　　There are other factors that make watercolor less popular than oil painting and water-ink painting.

　　Unlike Chinese water-ink painting, watercolor does not demand the character of brushstrokes. In general, watercolor brushes are made of soft hair that lacks flexibility, which allows only light strokes and touches, restricting variations or diversities. Without demonstrating a variety of brushstrokes, spontaneous and constrained, dark and bright, heavy and light, fast and slow, watercolor does not produce brushstrokes of Chinese water-ink painting that allow the artist’s soul to sing and dance.

　　A watercolorist paints with light and simple touches. In contrast, the sedimentary quality of the ink and the special texture of the Xuan Paper used for Chinese painting allow the ink to build up in layers and give Chinese water-ink paintings a rich and substantial look, which is impossible for a watercolorist to achieve. Nor is it possible for a watercolorist to create the sculptured look that an oil painter produces through the build-up of paint and the repetition of brushstrokes.

　　Is watercolor bound to be a lesser medium?

　　A modest and prudent watercolorist like Huang Tieshan is fully aware that to maintain the purity and simplicity of watercolor there is no point for him to emulate masters of oil and water-ink painting. Huang Tieshan knows that through his unique language he can explore and claim his own territory. Absorbing some of the vocabulary of Chinese and oil painting, he has expanded his horizon in artistic creation and enriched the style of his watercolor works.

　　It is essential for watercolor to retain its pure and simple style. The sunshine is transparent, so is the air, sky, and water. Watercolor has its own advantages in depicting transparent objects and phenomena. What factors generate the most miraculous impact on colors? Sunshine and air! If you can make sunshine dance in your painting at different times of the day, if you can fill every inch of space in your painting with air of different humidity, you will become a hunter of souls. An atmosphere that determines the mood and sentiments of the picture has been built for you.

　　The watercolor works created by Huang Tieshan have sustained the scorching sunshine from different latitudes and altitudes on earth. His works are immersed with the air of different humidity. The ultra-violet rays of the Tibetan plateau, the dazzling sunshine of the Mediterranean, the clear and bright air of Western Europe and North America, the drizzle and mist along the Yangtze River of South China, and the gloomy sky of Russia. The same sun produces different kinds of sunshine, so does the same sky embrace different kinds of air, which lead to different melodies and different moods. Following the magic touch of Huang Tieshan, we are bathed in different kinds of sunshine, breathing different kinds of air and experiencing different moods.

　　Talented in capturing moments of time, a prominent painter detects not only the geographical and spatial variations of sunshine and air but also their changes at different times. This talent is exactly the magic wand with which Huang Tieshan has struck us:. the sunrise over Dongting Lake, the dazzling sun at noon over the Qiang Village, the sunset in Brest, the twilight over Sahara, the moonlight over the Xiang River and lights along the Danube. Over 24 hours, from sunrise to sunset, the sun’s rays slip by the tip of tree branches, fly by castles, light up a cathedral, spread over the plateau at a tilted angle, rendering an emotional image of the departing sun at the corner of the sky. In the same fashion, the new crescent moon, the lonely lights of fishing boats and shadows of the frightened swans that broke the night’s silence turn us around abruptly, when we only see footprints of time among dimmed lights. Time, in Huang Tieshan’s works, is no longer an abstract concept recorded by numbers. It brings different brightness to our sight, different temperatures to our skin. Ultimately, light has endowed time with life and time starts singing and dancing.

　　Light and air have allowed landscapes and objects to be viewed with tones and perspectives, which even wobble slightly. This probably explains why the landscapes on the earth vary so much from those on the moon. With his profound awareness of the magic played by light and air, Huang Tieshan has painted his landscapes in a seemingly realistic approach which, however, at the same time exhibit strokes characterizing impressionistic techniques. Huang Tieshan has employed the Wet Brush Painting technique to represent the skyline formed by the ridge of mountains and the edge of forests, where light interacts with shadows. To separate the roof from the sky, leaves from the trunk, Huang Tieshan has painted white either with heavier ink and pressure at a slower speed or less ink at faster speed, with streaks of white formed by the separated hair of the dryer brush. To represent fog and clouds in the sky, Huang Tieshan has creatively inherited the Broken Ink and Splashed Ink methods from the Chinese water-ink painting. Borrowing techniques of Chinese cursive calligraphy, Huang Tieshan has rendered the ripples and waves in the river with fast strokes. Of course, Huang Tieshan is also adept at Dry Brush techniques, which he employed in delineating the skin of the elderly and the texture of rocks. The Dry Brush strokes are also present in the scattered sunshine in the forest, which has been created through the incomplete interface between the brush and the paper, when a dryer brush skimmed the granular surface of the paper swiftly. Huang Tieshan’s intimate knowledge of rules of color and his mastery of both the Western and Chinese painting techniques have enabled him to re-produce the thickness of the land, the density of the forest and the depth of the water mass through his light and simple touches. He did not surrender to oil or water-ink painting. Instead, he borrowed a few techniques from each. He refused to pursue scale and grandeur at the expense of the clarity and innocence of watercolor. Under Huang Tieshan’s brushes, watercolor has preserved the delicacy and purity of a girl in her first love. Under his cultivation, this girl’s character has quietly radiated a noble grace and an elegant poise. I believe this is why Huang Tieshan has maintained a life long communion with watercolor.

　　I am proud that my native province of Hunan has produced such a prominent master in watercolor painting.