Du Yongqiao, an eminent oil painter who was popular among a legion of young artists for his gift and achievement early in the 1960s when he was young, has shocked numerous young artists, who have just experienced the “1985 Art Trend”, again with his excellent works displayed at his two wonderful individual exhibitions after years of silence. Those young artists, viewing and emulating his fine paintings over and over again, are amazed at the miraculous art of the painter who is over sixty years old. Today the middle-aged ones, the younger fans of him back then, express their heartfelt praise and admiration when they appreciate his unique and perfect art. Mr. Du’s influence has even spread over to Taiwan, where the introduction to his art can frequently be found in newspapers or magazines.

　　His works concern the oil painting of landscapes and still lives, an art stemming from the west that usually stresses the appreciation and presentation of the natural beauty itself. Western painters are infatuated with the presentation of the complicated form and the changing light and color, from which their satisfaction often derives. But for Du Yongqiao, painting is a medium to express his feelings. The most moving part of art is the lyricism in painting.

　　The beautiful and peaceful natural environment in the countryside where Mr. Du was born, his life rife with poverty and hard work when he was young, and being nurtured in classical literature by his father have shaped his unique spiritual orientation and life pursuit. Loving nature and all the fine images in life, he appreciates and takes in all the interesting details around him. However, his life is full of twists and turns, probably because of the hardships in his childhood, or because he is often immersed in art and not good at dealing with people and is always misunderstood by others. It is perhaps these frustrations that make him devoted completely to art; painting has almost fully become his spiritual shelter. Mr. Du, unworldly yet genuine, is addicted only to his painting in his lifetime. He uses his painting to vent his pleasure and anger, sorrow and joy. Unlike other painters in the utilitarian contemporary painting circle, Du Yongqiao only goes his own way. If his early works sing of the pastoral peaceful beauty of nature, his latest works are soaking with a complex and obscure charm. In his paintings, his personality and feelings are injected into nature and nature mirrors the light of his spirit, rather than nature showing off its own beauty to mankind. He always paints old streets, old houses and southern watery villages in ancient style with attractive, melancholic and nostalgic feelings, a little chilly, sentimental, lonely and pacific. In Going Home, how many memories of childhood are recalled by the lonely old wooden bridge, the silent pond and the warm fire in the stove? In Old Propylaeum, and in My Childhood Home, how many sympathetic responses arise from the old buildings, the tender feelings between the mother and the baby, and from the little boy leaning against the door with his fantastic reveries? Such strong feelings penetrate into almost all his works, so that we can sense his feelings everywhere whether in the bleak beach in After the Rain, the seascape in Moonlight, or in the village path in Mud, the tranquil pond of lotus in Early Autumn, the girl in Piano Practice in front of the antique-flavored piano and the falling and fallen flowers in The Redness of Autumn. In the time when utilitarianism overflows, the pedantic and stubborn Du Yongqiao still persists in selecting only his favorite subjects for his paintings, and he finds himself hardly able to be integrated into the era devoid of sincerity. However, it is the persistent genuineness that expedites his success. The combination of the feeling in his deepest heart with a classical Chinese taste that is peaceful, indifferent, lonely, melancholic and sentimental makes his oil painting closer to the marrow of traditional Chinese art—the spirit to present one’s inner mind, a spirit of a pure oriental image.

　　The skill of realistic painting is undoubtedly the basis of Du’s oil painting. He started his painting course with the study of Russian oil painting and European oil painting in the 1950s. Quite capable of drawing sketches, Mr. Du has admirable and impeccable capabilities, following the strict standards of the Western Realism, of realistic painting (such as Naked Woman), as presented in both his watercolors and oil paintings. When he was young, Mr. Du madly clung to the western art of oil painting, especially the color in French Impressionism and Russian oil painting. He studied and emulated the masterpieces of former painters of this type so attentively that he was quite familiar with their various painting styles and skills. Perhaps it is because he was born to be supersensitive to colors, or because he was influenced by constantly seeing the abstractive forms of the traditional Chinese colors and ornamentations in the embroidery of his grandma and folk New Year pictures that in an era when realistic painting prevailed, Du Yongqiao, from the very beginning of his painting course, did not copy that style of presenting the reality and fortunately was not trapped in the prevalent frenzy of realistic painting in the end. Conversely, adroit at realistic painting skills, Mr. Du constantly paid his attention to the expressiveness of the painting form, for which he suffered a lot in the time when “formalism” was considered to be reactive politically. However, his art seems more purified and unadulterated than others.

　　When it comes to art, Wang Guowei (1877—1927) thought that in formative and realistic paintings, “the first form is the layout of the painting” and “the second is the use of brush and ink”, and he thought highly of the latter. “All I appreciate in a painting is indeed the second form…All my criticism towards calligraphy and painting is about the spirit, rhythm and taste, which are all concerned about the second form rather than the first one.” (Collection of Essays by Jing’ an, II) Wang Guowei emphasized the special and decisive aesthetic values of art itself. Likewise, Clive Bell (1850-1942), a western aesthetician a little later than Wang Guowei, put forward his famous viewpoint of “the significant form” in his book Art. If art, he argues, only narrates or represents the reality to arouse daily feelings or convey information, “it will never touch us aesthetically.” Conversely in his opinion, “what touches off our aesthetic feeling could only be the combination of lines and colors in a certain way,” i.e. “significant form”. Indeed, the history of art is full of feelings and forms opposite and complementary to each other and is also about the evolution of forms under the control of aesthetics. The independence of forms is the defining factor of the aesthetic value of art. Certainly, only in its own unique way different from any other forms can the art of painting express the painter’s individual feelings.

　　As a talented painter who perhaps has not studied these theories, Mr. Du has an intuition for art and a strong inclination for the artistic form. Even in the era when realism was dominant, he was not satisfied with realistic painting alone, but thirsted for the expression with his complex feelings about various colors as well. Furthermore, he always aspired to seek the distinctive pleasure in the quick movement of his brush. Mr. Du was immediately attracted by Maximov’s simple painting style and his ability to generalize the subject the first time he saw the art work of Maximov, a Soviet Union painter, in the 1950s when he was just a novice. Since then, Mr. Du embarked on his unique journey of oil painting. This intuitive pursuit for art reveals his outstanding insight into art. Most of his works derive from reality and seem to belong to the realistic genre; in his eyes, however, a realistic painting can certainly convey some feelings via the subject, but as to the art of painting, the form and expressiveness of the painting carry more of the painter’s self-cultivation, his aesthetic taste and his individual pursuit. The essence of his art consists in his distinctive forms of expression that are reflected in his brush- and color-using skills.

　　Mr. Du is inclined for differentiated shapes, forceful scratching and powerful brushstrokes. His strokes, full of strength, obvious, tough, bold, vigorous and straightforward, add a sense of weight in oil painting and also lay a decisive basis for his oil painting form. Having been wild about traditional Chinese art since his childhood, especially traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy for their various and changing strokes and the flexible and lively artistic conception, Du Yongqiao is by no means contented with the conventional singularity of the square stroke in western painting. Instead, he has tried to apply the complex Chinese stroke to his oil painting from the very beginning of his painting course. As a result, Mr. Du enjoys an outstanding status in the contemporary painting circle for his unique and distinctive brush-using ingenuity shaped by the charm of stroke in traditional Chinese art.

　　We can find varying strokes in his paintings: big or small, wide or narrow, regular or irregular (especially in the color blocks scratched by a painting knife), rough or smooth, etc. He has also applied the diversified strokes in Chinese painting—slow or quick, twisted or turned, dry or wet, central or sided and pressed or unpressed—to his oil paintings. The unique style of his painting consists of such changing strokes as the overlapping movement of the wet and dry strokes (as demonstrated in Street Entrance and Old Propylaeum), heavy and light strokes, big blocked and small dotted strokes, etc. The oil paintings of Du Yongqiao, refined and exquisite, can endure careful examination. Thus, if you want to appreciate his painting works, you’d better see his original works and observe the part. You will find that his painting ingenuity is manifested in every part of his works. In Mud, you see not only the lines of the trunk, the dry branches and the still lives, but also the charm of the oriental calligraphy with a twisting broken stroke with a continuous intention. In Sound Sleep, The Rain in the Water Village, and Old Street in the Southern Town, you hear the symphony produced by his complex strokes, while in such sketches as Impression, Sound of Waves, Beach and Moonlight, you hear the sonata of strokes…A piece of insightful and penetrating instruction Huang Binhong (1865—1955) had benefited for his whole life is the one he acquired when he began to learn painting as a little child, “Every stroke in a painting should be as clear and distinct as in the calligraphic writing.” Mr. Du, who appreciates Huang Binhong very much, adopts Huang’s painting method in his own paintings as well, i.e. his every stroke is clear and distinct. Although he paints on the basis of realism, Mr. Du never lets the object hinder him from using strokes, but looks for the harmony between the stroke and the object. His strong ability to paint realistically helps him achieve this harmony, as shown in An American Girl, An American Teacher, and Kneeling in the Nude. However, what is more important for Mr. Du is the brushstroke—the substantial tracks of a painter’s subjective emotions. In whatever way the brushstrokes in his painting are overlapped, each of them is still tangible and visible. Du Yongqiao is pioneering in blending the use of ink in traditional Chinese with the expressiveness of brushwork in western painting, which makes his oil painting take on a new oriental look.

　　This spirit of the oriental art and the subjective-feeling-oriented aesthetic taste also bring up extraordinary coloring of Mr. Du in oil painting. His oil painting is characterized by his application of the subjective spirit of the oriental painting to his brushwork; likewise, his coloring is enriched by the pure and complicated ink-using in the way of super-realistic presentation. Mr. Du is so infatuated with color that he obtains a lot of pleasure from the expressiveness of coloring itself, a joy others are hardly able to understand. He is one of the few innocent painters I have ever seen who always curiously observes, feels and experiences the lively and flourishing world at any moment and he lives all the time in an artistic atmosphere. He madly clings to not only the colors in the boundless universe, but also the creation of his own colorful world—a free world of art. Therefore, his free aesthetic instinct makes him indisposed to passively obey or imitate nature just as other painters in his generation do; instead, he prefers to gain inspiration from the colors in nature and then to promote, exaggerate or imagine this inspiration according to his own ideal, taste and feelings—no wonder his works are full of poetic and dreamlike enchantment of color between similarity and dissimilarity.

　　The layout of the color in his works is precise and rigorous. Even though the coloring relations derive from reality, he also further exaggerates or abstracts them in his paintings subjectively. And he gives full play to his talented ability to present colors especially in the detailed part. While keeping the harmony among the bigger color blocks, he also deals with partial color blocks with his intuition and his adept skills of coloring by contrasting cold color and warm color, by changing the size of the color blocks and through the variation and conflict between the saturate, transparent, florid and massive colors in a bid to make the whole painting look more substantial. In a dark part, the coloring not only is transparent with the subtle taste of cold and warm brush touches, but also stresses the space leaving or freely breathing arrangement, just like the arrangement of delicate changes of splashed, broken and massive ink only within one patch of splashed ink in a traditional Chinese painting (as shown in My Childhood Home and Ripe Melons). Mr. Du also shows his delicate sense of coloring in light colors and even white by making them look saturated. Preferring to the mellow grey because of his emotionally melancholic tendencies, Du Yongqiao always develops the beautiful yet bleak scene to its fullest by the expressiveness of the grey coloring which covers innumerable grey-based colors to supplement each other explicitly or implicitly. For example, he sprinkles some bright and warm dotted blocks in a patch of cold grey (as displayed in Sound of Waves and The Rain in the Water Village), or he mingles shreds of cold blue or green with a patch of warm grey (as manifested in Market and Autumn Moon). The complex and fine coloring changes are specially subtle and exquisite in the detailed part. Mr. Du’s profound knowledge of the secret of coloring relationships comes not only from his rich experience in coloring theories and regular coloring patterns during his forty odd years of painting, but also from his excellent intuition of coloring. As a result, he is able to deal with the color like a magician so that his each brush of coloring is worth tasting and appreciating carefully, for in his painting, even just one brushstroke contains various and splendid colors, from the cold color to the warm one. His coloring, on the one hand, presents the object in an appropriate manner, and on the other hand, independently embodies the lasting appeal of coloring itself. This extremely exquisite and subtle expression of coloring has surpassed the naturalist aesthetic taste that aims to bring back the reality.

　　Also worth mentioning is that, by overlapping and interweaving colors and brushstrokes, he produces a unique and abstractive taste. One can sense a certain mystery beyond description in the faintly discernible and vague artistic conception in Mr. Du’s works. Even appreciated independently, those parts will be found to harbor their own aesthetic values. No wonder the paintings of Du Yongqiao have attracted many spectators’ careful examination and study with magnifying lens, making them linger on the aesthetic taste of coloring and reminding them of the free brushwork of Qi Baishi in his wash painting of shrimps. And most preciously, the artistic ingenuity of Mr. Du is, without any intensive attention, full of unleashed and natural brushstrokes.

　　When talking about the relationship between nature and painting, Dong Qichang (1555—1636) said, “In the light of the reality, a mountain is better than a painting mountain; but from the perspective of art, a painting mountain is better than a real one.” Chinese painters are always fully confident in themselves in face of nature. It is because of the painter’s feeling, will, ideal and taste expressed in his painting that an art work can surpass the real nature, isn’t that true? From his intuition as a Chinese, Du Yongqiao, an outstanding painter who had a systematic training in western realist oil painting, is aware from the very beginning that there are not any artistic expressions or any “aesthetic taste” in an object itself. If the “aesthetic taste” is not injected into the object, art will decay, for the “aesthetic taste” is the priority in a painting. It is in this aspect, a crucial one of the oriental aesthetics which certainly has something in common with the western modern aesthetics, that Mr. Du has integrated his oil painting with the system of oriental art. If “creation with the soul” is the heart of the oriental art, Mr. Du’s oil paintings, with full embodiment of his personality, feeling, ideal and individual interest, deserve the title of the oriental oil painting. In comparison with many painters who advocate the nationalization of oil painting, he promotes it in a more implicit, substantial, essential and, without a shadow of doubt, outstanding way.

August 1997

作者：Lin,Mu