大人的童话

◆◆Adult Fairy Tale

由于职业奔波的原因，这几年常常会有很长的时间消耗在各种交通工具上，有时候希望手边有本书能够翻翻，却遗憾没养成旅途带书的习惯。一个月前，一个同样奔波的朋友推荐了一款叫“微信读书”软件，因为便捷，从不看电子书的自己也试着开始尝试了起来。软件会推荐用户阅读较多的书，《安徒生童话》便是排名靠前的一本。我不明白为什么一本小朋友的枕边书会被这么多人阅读，好奇心促使我买下了这本书。依稀还记得小时候阅读童话故事时的场景，一则故事能反复的阅读，每一次都充满着不一样的欣喜与快乐，黑白的文字也会在脑海中被填画成有着最明亮颜色的图像。然而当《海的女儿》、《卖火柴的小姑娘》、《雪人》、《丑小鸭》这一次被再次阅读的时候，一股莫名的伤感涌入脑子，这哪是给小孩看的故事，这分明是被年岁所抹去的纯真与善意。伴随着飞驰的高铁，你发现抓不住窗外任何一幅心仪的画面一样，手机屏上的黑白文字也再也填不起鲜艳的色彩来。

年底要做大段的画展，去看画，因为她要带孩子的缘故，这次去的是家里而不是工作室。家里挤满了孩子的玩具，空了面墙，墙上有两张未画完的画，大段说孩子太小时常会挤走自己完整的时间，抽空便来画一些，也常常是深夜。此时大段三岁的大女儿跑了进来，外面的摇篮里更小的婴儿正在熟睡，因为正在聊画画的事情，我似乎也忘了问外面的孩子叫什么名字，是男孩还是女孩，也是忽略了客人的基本礼仪。“墙上画的妈妈哪一个更漂亮？”（大段每一张画中的人物都是自己）“左边的那张。”大女儿几乎没有思考就回答了这个问题。我有意识的再次看了看墙上的画，左边的大段戴着皇冠，皇冠是有颜色的，而右边的大段仅仅勾了墨稿。颜色对于孩子来说是非常有吸引力的，这是她迅速作出选择的关键。也就是这个思考的瞬间，我突然又好像回到了高铁上，一篇童话故事让成年人失去填色记忆的瞬间。

还是来看看大段的画吧。首先大段的画是有名字的，大家可能会疑问，每张画都好像有名字，这有什么好单独提出来说的。《大鱼的黑喷泉》、《梦中的一株玫瑰花》、《秋天的叶子与泡泡》、《王妃的耳环》，这是我从大段的画册里随意摘录的一些作品名，这些名字听起来便有故事，像极了童话名。而我们翻开画册对应画面的内容也有一种一一对应的亲切感，而这种亲切感正是我们这个时代的水墨作品有所缺失的。暂且不谈水墨造型语言，如果要深究这个时代水墨作品的内容表达，懒于思考的艺术家往往会以一个系列的名字来命名他们很长时间内大部分作品，这是美术史的归纳方式而非个人。对于这种“专一”并不能批评什么，我们也只能对水墨的叙事性提出疑问。如果笔墨不能承载内心的故事，作品仅仅剩下材料的玩味，这是不完整的。相反，大段的水墨作品强调叙事性，而叙事中有着丰富的个人情感、经历、想象。我见过大段的方案本，方案本在水墨艺术家中是少见的。大段几乎每一张画在起稿前都有完整的作品名、文字、构图与象征物，并以此记录着一张画从思考到创作的过程。大段在谈及每一张画的创作时都会跟我们讲一个故事，或一段儿时的经历，一些阅读文字后的感悟，一些每天经历的点滴。这种面对面的叙述，对艺术家而言是极其真实的，这是她生活的一部分，亦是精神生活的一部分，而对于我这样的听众，总有一些成年人阅读儿时童话的感觉，也会明白童话里的故事只是用美丽与自然的文字去述说现实的故事而已。

其次大段的画是善良的。用善良去形容一个人的作品可能略显不妥，但在这里是合适的。除去艺术家自身形象，我们还能在大段的画中找到许多植物世界或动物世界的形象，这里面有常见的生活之物，有美好的象征之物，有虚构的想象之物，亦有无法亲近的“凶恶”之物。因此我很难用简单的浪漫或是现实的美术史划分方式去归纳，我更倾向于艺术家情感的归纳。我阅读了大段给自己的一篇后记，其中除了她对艺术之路的坚持之外，我还感觉到了浓浓的善意。艺术家想在画面用拥抱一切美好之物，于是她把自己的形象放了进去，此刻略显冲突的画面是和谐而善良的。就像很多童话都会有一对王子与公主，他们永远有一座美丽的城堡，他们也共同拥有着人类最优秀的品质一样，大段常常也会在画面中构建自己的城堡，她的城堡里任何动物与植物都可以相互对话，这也是故事与生活的区别，它们相互交织也可以互相想象。最后我要谈谈大段的色彩，简单看来，看似平涂填色画面却有着丰富的笔触与色彩变化，大面积的色彩对比让画面明亮而夺目，其中的鲜艳已经达到了水墨的材料局限。关于色彩我们很容易联想到儿童绘本或是童话故事的绘本，其中的画面与联想让我们能瞬间勾起一些孩童时的回忆。回到现实，听着大段的故事，看着大段的画，体味着五彩斑斓的颜色，却如同阅读一本大人的童话，像是在时间流逝与生活琐碎交迫下一次灿烂的冥想。这种感觉随着色彩越明亮而越发感伤。

听着故事，我开始忘了哪个故事应该对应的是哪一张画，不变的却是艺术家在画面里的自画像与斑驳的色彩，因为画家永远是画家，她画的是自己而不是你。我跟大段说：“你的画为快乐者而快乐，为忧伤者而伤。”就像每一个小朋友看同一本童话书都会有自己最喜欢的故事，我们是不是能忘记时间去猜想，喜欢不同故事的人都会因为看似无意的挑选而像自己。

关于大段的画，这是艺术家的日记，却是观众的童话。

2016.11.23

林书传

Tales For The Grown-ups

 

Having been rushed off my feet with my jobs and stuck in the time-consuming transportation, I have always thought whether I could squeeze out the time to read a book during my business trips yet I have never succeeded. While, things have changed last month when one of my friends who also suffered from the hectic work recommended me to an app named “WeChat Reading”. As it’s really convenient for reading, I started to try this e-book that I have never used before. Among all the popular books recommended by this app, Andersen’s Fairy Tales is the top one, which made me wondering why this child-friendly book is so popular. Fostered by curiosity, I downloaded it. Indeed, this book made me recall the scenes in my childhood that I read those fairy tales repeatedly, filling my mind with full happiness from different stories. These black words and white background overlapped in my mind, which created the most shining view for me. But when I read the stories of The Daughter Of The Sea, The Little Match Girl, Snowman and The Ugly Ducking again, the outpouring gloomy sorrow crept into my mind and I finally found that this was not a book for children, but represented the purity and kindness that have been erased by the time! When I thought about this, I felt like the words on the screen of my phone became colorless and the beautiful scenes outside the window of the high-speed railway are fleeting.

For preparing Da Duan’s exhibition by the end of this year, I went her house instead of her studio as she had to take care of her children at home. In her house, toys could be found everywhere and there are two unfinished works hanging on a wall. Da Duan told me that when her kids were too young, she had to look after her babies and sacrifice her time on painting. Sometimes she could spare a little time at midnight for painting. Being so devoted to the talk on her paintings, I even forgot asking her the name and gender of her little baby who was still sleeping in the cradle, which was my ignorance of manners as a guest. Then her 3-year-old daughter ran in, and Da Duan asked her: “Which mom is more beautiful in the two paintings on the wall?” (she drew herself on the two paintings) “The left one”, her daughter answered without hesitation. So I took another close look at the two paintings. She painted herself a crown for the left one with colors while the right one is just an ink drawing with black and white. Color is fascinated by children and this was the key factor for her to make such a rapid decision, which suddenly reminded me of the time on the train when I realized that grown-ups could hardly color their life as they used to be any more.

 

Let us move back to Da Duan’s paintings. The first thing needs to be highlighted is the name of each painting. Here are some of the names I pick up from her painting catalogue at random - Big Fish’s Black Fountain, Dream Rose, Leaves & Bubbles In Autumn and Princess’ Earrings – which sound like the names of the fairy tales that can unfold your imagination. When I opened her catalogue and enjoyed the fantastic relation between the names and the paintings, I could feel a sense of affinity, which is exactly what the Chinese ink and wash paintings are lacking in our time. Putting styles of ink and wash painting aside, if we scrutinize the contents of current Chinese ink and wash paintings and their names, we will find that those lazy painters will only name the whole series of their works in a same way. Actually this way of naming is an inductive approach to the history of art rather than to individual, which is hard to be criticized. However, we can question whether those paintings can carry the stories. If a painter only focuses on the materials and cannot embody his/her mind in the works, the painting he/she create must be not integrated. On the contrary, Da Duan’s ink and wash paintings greatly emphasize the narratives, which revealed abundant personal feelings, experience and imagination. I also saw her proposals before which is rarely used by ink and wash painters. The proposals record the name, text, composition and indication of almost each of her works before they were painted, presenting the detailed process of creating the paintings. When she introduced each of her work, she would tell me a story or childhood experience, a feeling after reading or the moments of life. These descriptions perfectly reflect her real life, both physically and mentally. Her stories sounded like fairy tales to me and I also came to understand that the fairy tales, in essence, are telling the story of the real world with touching and natural words.

 

Besides, Da Duan’s painting brush is full of kindness. Kind may not be a proper word to describe a painting except for her works. In addition to her own identification, she also creates a world of plants and animals in her painting, injecting the elements such like daily stuffs, romantic fancies, imagining objects even unfriendly and awful things to the world. So it’s incorrect to categorize her work as either realism or romanticism based on the history of arts. Personally I prefer to categorize her works according to the painters’ emotions. After reading a postscript that Da Duan wrote for herself, I not only got to know that she insists on the road towards arts, but also was touched by her kindness. She tries to embrace all the beauties in the framework of her work by blending herself with her paintings. Even though conflict can be seen from her works, harmony is the real spirit. Just like many fairy tales that live a couple - prince and princess - who own a beautiful castle and share the noblest quality, in Da Duan’s paintings, she also establishes her own castle where animals and plants can talk to each other - this is also a difference between stories and life that imagining and real things can coexist. Moreover, Da Duan is good at managing the abundant colors with various strokes. Her brush moves smartly which enable her to fully develop colors as she wants. Large scale of colors brightens and shines her paintings, which maximize the top capacity of ink and wash. When seeing colors, we may easily think of fairy books which can simultaneously bring us back to our childhood time. And now, we can still enjoy stories and paintings of Da Duan and appreciate its colors though we have grown up. It feels like reading a grown-up’s fairy tales, accompanying by a sparkling meditation amid the time lapses and trivial life. The more colorful as the paintings may be, the more sentimental we are.

After hearing too many stories, I got confused and could not match stories with each painting. But what remain clear in my mind are the self-portraits and the gorgeous colors of her artworks. I talked to Da Duan: “The emotion of your paintings varies from what the audiences see. If they are happy, they will discover happiness from your paintings and vice verse.” Just like every child has his/her own favorite story in a fairy book, can we forget the time and just stay true to ourselves when we find ourselves in the different stories?

In a word, Da Duan’s paintings act both like her diaries and audience’s fairy tales.

2016.11.23

Lin Shu Chuan