Oriental painting

When visiting China, you will have the opportunity to learn traditional Oriental painting as well as calligraphy. While touring the ancient city of Lijiang, the paradise scenic city of Guilin, or visiting the noted mountain Huangshan, You will find here the most popular thing to buy is scroll of Oriental painting. You will also find it is extremely interesting and intriguing to paint with soft brushes. If you are a Oriental painting art lover, don't forget to take some of these stuffs back home.

The Classification of Oriental painting:

Chinese Flower-and- Bird Painting: Flowers and birds, being the leading figures since Neolithic ceramists painted their works, have conveyed the metaphors and images of artists for more than a thousand years. For example, the pine trees represent the uprightness and immortality. Together with the bamboo and prunes, the pine trees are known as the three friends of winter. The orchid, a modest flower, is often used to describe the virtuous artists and scholars. Another much depicted group of flowers are the flowers of the four seasons. They are the peony-standing for the riches and honors; the lotus-coming out of the mire without being smeared and meaning for purity; the chrysanthemum-meaning for elegance, righteousness and longevity; and the prunes-meaning for bravery and the messenger of spring.

Oriental Landscape painting: regularly features mountains, water or mist which are symbolic. Water and mist donate happiness and good fortune with the mountains represents long life. Some artists who like to include people, animals and homes into the painting are trying to convey a feeling of a fortunate long and happy life with the unison of soul and nature coming together.

Oriental Figure painting: The style for paintings that illustrates human figures. "Figure" in short, is a major genre in the Oriental painting. Chinese Figure Painting is generally divided into Taoist-and-Buddhist Painting, Female Images, Portrait, Genre Painting, and History-story painting, etc. Figure Painting strives for precise and lifelike depiction of the character's personality, both outlook and spirit. In the contemporary age, Figure Painting stresses more on "learn from the nature", assimilates the western techniques, and has made progresses in both modeling and coloring.

In Oriental painting, we can mention 2 countries where have lots of famous painters. That is Japan and China so now we will discuss about Japanese painters.

Japanese painters who were in the period of Muromachi depicted a deeper sense of space and every painting portrayed a story. Painting on landscapes developed in the period of Momoyama (1573 - 1603) and these are normally depicted on very big screens. During the period of Edo (1603 - 1867), a complete different way of painting emerged where gold leaf backgrounds were given to the paintings to get a holy mosaic effect that belonged to the Western Medieval period. Ukiyo-e style of painting emerged involving woodblock printing at the same time. Thus, Japanese paintings are rich in their medium of portrayal and this makes them very fascinating.

Japanese painting had an influence from the styles of western too in the period of Meiji (1868 - 1912). Various schools for painting were open in Japan and every school followed the style of their interest. Suibokuga points to a painting that uses black ink for paintings. This had a unique mark of Zen Buddhism having inherited from Oriental painting is painted on rice paper or thin silk with brushes, Chinese ink and Chinese painting dye. In terms of topics, Oriental painting can be classified into three branches: human figures; Landscapes; flowers and birds. So the painting of ladies, the painting of mountains and the painting of insects and fish belong to the three branches respectively. In Oriental painting techniques, one is traditional Chinese realistic painting characterized by fine brushwork and close attention to detail, the other is freehand brushwork.

The hand painted scroll is one example of how art was used to communicate in ancient China. The format used for Chinese paintings varied widely over time. Massive wall paintings, free-standing screens, horizontal and vertical scrolls, were some of the formats used. The horizontal hand scroll unrolled from right to left, giving the viewer a chance to look at one segment at a time. The horizontal hand scroll was like a picture story book, and lead to the shorter vertical hanging scroll. Oriental painting and the history of the development of China's social and cultural development, changes in the history closely linked, it is accompanied by knowledge of Western and other natural and cultural knowledge to enter China.