ILLUSTRATED:

PROVENANCE:

Lin Fengmian's "Woodcutters in the Pine Forest" utilizes the traditional flat and distant type of composition in order to create a placid, faraway, and peaceful tone. In depicting the subjects, the artist uses straight, slanted, and curved lines and circles, as well as changes in positions and colors in the expanse of space. It also contributed to the aesthetics and the life of the work, a balanced and stable composition.

In creating the form of this work, the artist's most successful technique was his use of color ink. The thick forest in the foreground and the comfortable mountain images in the background create a contrast between dense and diffuse. The mountain valleys which look like they are floating in the air bring out the wild geese on the right, flying toward the limitless space between earth and sky. It is here that Lin demonstrates his unique technique of mixing color and black ink. For the landscape, he added highlights of burnt ochre, blue, green, and other colored inks according to the needs of the painting, the coolness and warmth of light, and the distance between the subjects. This method originated in Western painting, but the visual effect is in fact very close to that of traditional painting. The changes in the ink application accomplish two things: one, to show the depth between the foreground and the background and two, in the middle of the dense/diffuse contrast, to offer a kind of "rhythm" of change. The parts where the ink was applied more heavily are in the foreground and the background, whereas the space in between them is much lighter in shade and blurred, thus creating a certain rhythm and series of changes in the ink-applied areas. On the other hand, the artist once again creatively transplants and modifies Western modern art style and composition to create a new visual effect completely different from traditional scholarly paintings.