The Landscapes of Life
By Qi Jia
Life is a journey; for an artist who loves life with sincerity after experiencing its ups and downs, the artworks will be a window into the artist’s heart that reveal the landscapes along this journey and will be the voice for communicating to the world. What is echoed in the heart may be warmth, tranquility, or even a touch of melancholy, yet the focus is entirely on what the artist can share through their art.
In Liu Daguang’s paintings, one can always find the sentimentality revealed from the serene and naïve landscapes. Born and brought up in Beijing, Liu has an attachment to the sceneries of the north: the modesty of the yellow earth, the tranquility of the snowfield, the warmth of the golden autumn, and the exuberance of midsummer. In talking with Liu, you will feel his guilelessness and even the childlike nature that makes his work unaffected and pure. Dazzling colors are seldom seen in his paintings, but the beautiful natural scenes ignored in our daily routines are so precisely captured by him, and only someone with sincerity towards life and nature can discover abundance and splendor from such simplicity. Though a touch of melancholy may be sensed in Liu’s paintings, it never brings gloom, but only poetic meditation.
Liu was born in 1947 and spent his childhood in the yard of an agricultural academy, which was surrounded by gardens, experimental farmlands and animal cots. What inspired his interest in painting in his childhood was a high-school graduation album left by his mother, who passed away when Liu was only seven. The sketches and poetries filled with sentimentalities in the album triggered his love for painting, and brought him to study in the Fine Arts School attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts. In that school, he was trained under the strict Russian sketch teaching system of realism.
If there had been no Cultural Revolution, Liu might have moved on to the Central Academy of Fine Arts to obtain his higher education on painting, but the wheels of history had taken him away from that path, like what had happened to most of the educated youth of that generation. “I have experienced all walks of life,” Liu said, “there were ups and downs in the life experience, but all of those are great treasures.” He had worked in the field of the countryside, had been a stage designer in the army, an art designer for a store, an over-the-counter salesman, and had even been a businessman after the opening up of China in the 80s. “But I always knew that I couldn’t give up painting”. Liu said. Many of his extraordinary opaque water color paintings were stealthily completed during the Cultural Revolution when he was in the army; these paintings are kept as invaluable treasures today by Liu. No one can remain apathetic in front of these paintings as they convey the irrepressible passion of a youth living in a harsh past when individual creativity was suppressed. With an excellent foundation in painting and continuous training during the past decades, he fully devoted himself to the path of painting after all. There have been various art trends in China after the end of the Cultural Revolution, but Liu persists in the style of realism. “The poetic expression of beauty is forever my pursuit in art.” Liu said. To breathe fresh air in nature and sketch the beautiful landscapes is truly the greatest joy in his life. He would, together with his son, walk into the woods of the suburbs and spend the whole day painting, or go to any lovable yet ordinary place in the city to capture its beauty in his sketch books.
Painting is a process of discovery, the discovery of beauty and of self. Just like one of Liu’s paintings The Never-ending Road，no one will stop pursuing and discovering what he/she believes to be the meaning of his/her life with the journey leading to an unknown yet hopeful future.
