Artist: Fan Kuan (c. 990-1030)
Title: Travelers amid Streams and Mountains.
Material: ink and color on silk
Site:
Current Location: National Palace Museum Taibei.
Period/Date: Northern Song dynasty
Iconography/Iconology: The great mountain is symbolic of the universal
mountain, whether Daoist or Buddhist. The position of humans in the composition
is minimized to the point of their being hard to discern even when the viewer
is directly in front of the large, original painting. The emaphasis is now
on the elements of landscape, rather than human activity which is represented
by a small group of travellers in the lower right section of the painting.
Stylistic Comments: Stylistically, the painting is done in a very
realistic, detailed manner. The artist is not directly painting from
nature but is more likely painting in a studio from memory, or remembered
visions of what an ideal landscape should be.One of the essential features
is that there should be a place for the viewer to travel on, such as a road,
trail, bridges, and the like, during their visual journey through the painting.
Also included in these elements that encourage the viewer's "travel"
are waterways, mist, and high contrast areas of the composition. In this
latter convention, the Chinese artists made complex and sophisticated, but
emperical, use of what is known today as perceptual psychology. In this
particular painting the visual journey begins at the lower right in the
foreground of the composition. One is immediately greeted by fellow travellers
moving in the same direction. As one moves forward along the path, it would
be possible to exit at the left side of the painting without exploring the
composition. However, such is not the point of the painting. Rather, one
is inteded to visually travel up toward the waterfall in the center of the
foreground, move across the mist enshrouded middle ground, and be swept
visually up the high contrast chasm in the mountain area at the left of
the painting. Following the edge of the mountain, moving up to the top and
flowing across the tree encrusted peak, the viewer's eye is guided towards
a complex rift in the mountain and down the high contrast area of the painting,
a white waterfall against the black chasm. That this is an intentional design
becomes certain when one discovers, nestled among the treetops, the roofs
of temple buildings-- the only other sign of human activity in the entire
composition.
The painting is developed with an amazing number of tiny detailed strokes
in which individual leaves, rock textures and even the architectural details
of the temple are portrayed with fastidious and minute care. Fan Kuan uses
a characteristic brush stroke known as the "raindrop stroke" in
a meticulous, pointilistic technique, closely akin to the modern stippling
process. The edges of tree trunks, the sides of mountains, and the rocks
in the foreground are delineated with Fan Kuan's characteristically bold,
dark lines. The control of the brush necessary for this technique borders
on astonishing. The unforgiving nature of the silk support with its collagen
or gum ground, demands the utmost preplanning precision and execution in
control of the medium. No errors can be corrected, once the paint is applied.
Thus every stroke must be where and what the artist intended.A painting
like this might have been displayed in the traditional context where it
would have been examined and discussed for hours by scholars and collectors
alike.
This painting possesses the signature of the artist, Fan Kuan. From the
Northern Sung dynasty onwards, artists began to asert themselves through
signatures.
