When talking about pastels in China, what come first to my mind are Li Chaoshi’s still life, Yan Wenliang’s indoor scenes, and Chen Danqing’s body-painting works. Li Chaoshi once took Degas as his teacher when he studied in France, and after his return to China, he was active in the spread of the pastel. His still lifes of flowers, vegetables and fruits are the best, containing some aftertaste of the flower-and-bird paintings in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Yan’s works about scenes in kitchens bring us back to the Republican Period to enjoy the peaceful afternoon of southern families. In Chen’s pastels of human bodies, either male or female ones, sex appeal is presented.
Sex appeal is found only in beautiful lives. This is also the essence of western human body art since ancient Greece. In top-grade body-painting works, sex appeal naturally flows without any erotic plots. These are beautiful lives I refer to.
Both lines and colors can be seen in pastels and this is an advantage. A pastel can be either a sketch or a colorful oil painting. However, Chen Danqing’s pastels lie between the two, in which lines and colors are in harmony. He ever studied personally from French masters, so his works combine Chardin’s simplicity, Watteau’s extravagance, Manet’s brightness, and Degas’s integration of lines and colors. AncientChineseartists laid much emphasis on keeping the writing brush perpendicular with the paper and the tip of the brush in the middle of the lines, and this is what we call “zhong feng yong bi”. From Renaissance to 19th century, pencils were also usually used this way to draw sketches in Europe. Chen was originally good at sketching. It was after he went to New York in 1980s that he began to draw pastels. For him, the feel is equally good. But his pastels are more exquisite and more reversionary than his sketches. “Zhong feng yong bi” is fully applied. Lines start and extend naturally. The profile of bodies, the weight, the space, the volume, and bones and flesh are all started from lines and finished with lines. Abundant shapes, vivid gestures, chubby bodies and even the temperature of the skin are fully displayed on the paper.
Since the beginning of modernism, for paintings, good taste is particularly emphasized. While we can say the lines are vivid, elegant , meaningful, or lovely, vitality is dying away. Chen’s pastels go across modernism and post-modernism and back to the legacy of the 19th century. His lines are precise and vibrant. It’s certain that in the future pastels will be popular among painters, and numerous fine pastels will emerge. But archaistic pastels like this will probably be rare.
