Unique in lacquer paintings and cultural beauty
Lacquer is considered one of the painting materials in Vietnam. This is the exploration and technical development of the traditional Vietnamese craft of painting into lacquer technique. However, the word used to call lacquer (English: Lacquer) is often understood to be Japanese and Chinese fine art paint utensils. Grinding technique is the big difference between fine art painting crafts and Vietnamese lacquer paintings.
1. Artistic characteristics of lacquer paintings
Traditional lacquer painting has three colors brown, black and vermilion. By the 1930s, artists began to use a new technique known as chisel, which gave a richer color blend and added a sense of size and distance. The painting is done on wood. It is covered with a cloth coated with lacquer sap and then covered with a layer of resin mixed with soil. The board is then sandpapered and coated with a layer of hot sap. After polishing, it produces a smooth black surface with a brilliant sheen. The artist uses hot lacquer to sketch and the colors are applied layer by layer after the underlying layer has dried.
(Dawn on the farm by painter Nguyen Duc Nung (1914-1993))
Finishing steps include polishing and re-washing the painting. This process sounds like a brutal treatment of artwork, but it's actually done with great care. The result is a brilliant picture. Through years of experimentation, artisans add other materials such as vegetable ash, crushed eggshells, gold and silver to embellish their work. These materials help modern artists express themselves and add creativity and stylistic personality to their artworks.
2. Cultural beauty in lacquer paintings
Unlike other paintings, there is no limit to the creativity in the material on the surface of the painting, or the delicate color blends and the variety of colors. Lacquer paintings have higher requirements on workmanship, as well as time or effort spent to create a beautiful work of lacquer art, in paintings always require a very high gloss without convexity or blur. or ripples, so that the viewer can completely touch them to feel the uniqueness on the surfaces of the paintings, thereby seeing the effort, meticulousness and talent of the lacquer painters.
(The work of the village, author Nguyen Gia Tri)
The themes in lacquer paintings are often directed to traditional cultural values and especially a famous line of paintings in lacquer paintings are paintings of Hanoi's old town, the places where the artist has lived. visit or live. Besides the scenes of daily life, festivals, lotus flowers, scenes of people's activities, ....
(The work The team changed the mountain, author Hoang Tich Chu)
In addition to the traditional materials used by the artists, these paintings can also be inlaid with gold to create a very beautiful and luxurious highlight, which is easy to see on the masterpieces of lacquer paintings that you can admire. .
It can be seen that the cultural beauties of the Vietnamese people are vividly reproduced by the painters through lacquer paintings, giving viewers the feeling of being alive in the space at that time. In general, lacquer painting shows us its own unique features that no other material has.
