Decoding the Symbolism of Natural Elements in Oil Painting from the Perspective of Ecological Aesthetics

Ecological aesthetics is a new concept of aesthetics in the “post-modern” context, and Heidegger used the concept of the fourfold whole to express the form of human existence. He believed that “the sky, the earth, man, and God. In these four voices, destiny brings together the whole of infinite relationships. But none of the four parties holds and operates one-sidedly and autonomously.”Heidegger reveals that human existence cannot be separated from the dependence on the external natural environment, and his conception of this is consistent with Marx’s assertion that nature is not outside the body. Artistic creation is inseparable from the perception of self-life, and our emotions are nurtured in the space and time of our existence. According to Heidegger, “the problem of existence can only be clarified through the activity of existence itself”, and contemporary eco-art, as an artistic interpretation of the problem of existence, cannot be separated from a correct understanding of this. Therefore, “the work of art can never get rid of the fate of ‘in the world’”, so the essence of contemporary eco-art is the clarification of this in, and the root of this clarification is the idea of ecological aesthetics.

The earliest use of “image-symbolism” and “oil painting” appeared in Xie Yijia’s article “On the Imagery and Modeling of Oil Painting” published in Fine Arts in 1985. Since then, the term “imaginative oil painting” has appeared repeatedly. The first time the proposition of “Imagery Oil Painting” was put forward in an academic forum was in May 2005 at the “Chinese Imagery Oil Painting Invitational Exhibition” in Shanghai. Subsequently, a large number of studies related to “imagery oil painting” began to appear, and this artistic concept gradually aroused heated discussions. “Imagery oil painting is not a simple style or genre. It is a process and an embodiment of the assimilation of oil painting, a medium capable of revealing and manifesting the spirit of Western culture, into the Chinese cultural psyche and aesthetic structure, and it is an inevitable trend of the localization of Western oil painting by Chinese culture.” In this paper, we believe that “Imagery Oil Painting” is characterized by “fusion of East and West” on a macro level, which is an organic combination of Western media with Eastern thinking and national aesthetics. “Imagery oil painting” not only rationally utilizes the materials and techniques of Western painting, but also inherits the artistic characteristics of Chinese painting, such as line, composition, and brushwork. At the same time, it should have the traditional Chinese aesthetic thinking and awareness, and should be reconstructed, fused, and transformed with western painting concepts and media. If the artist’s picture only uses oil paint and Chinese brushwork to present things objectively, it does not have the essential characteristics of “imagery oil painting”. Artists’ creations should contain traditional Chinese cultural characteristics and connotations, embody the aesthetic thinking of Chinese imagery, integrate with the phenomena of contemporary life and ideology, and ultimately present a contemporary Chinese local style.

Imagery oil painting of natural elements learns the layout of scattered perspective in Chinese painting, and is no longer limited to the focus perspective of traditional Western painting, and arranges the picture of the work with the artist’s self-perception, paying special attention to the positional relationship, primary and secondary relationship, the relationship between reality and falsehood, echoing relationship, interspersing relationship, etc. In the layout of the picture, an oriental flavor is presented that differs from that of Western oil paintings. The expression of “reality and emptiness” in imaginative oil painting is not only a mere visual change, but also a breakthrough of the boundaries of time and space, which is a deeper unification of the artist’s subjective feelings and understanding of the outside world with his own emotions and aesthetic experience, and a unification of the artist’s spirit and psychology with the picture.

The artistic concept of natural elements in imagery and oil painting, which borrows objects to express emotions, leads to imagery modeling, usually adopting artistic forms such as exaggeration, deformation, decomposition, reconstruction, and so on.Imagery oil painters start from the perspective of subjective emotion, generalize object modeling according to the subject’s visual and intuitive experience, reflecting a sense of formal beauty. In Wu Guanzhong’s paintings, he often combines black, white and grey with dots, lines and surfaces in Chinese ink to form the image of objects in the picture, and generalizes and simplifies the shapes of the depicted objects, which seems to be simplified, but in fact strengthens the characteristics of the objects and makes them condensed.

The color of natural elements occupies an important position in the artistic language of oil painting. Traditional Chinese painting is influenced by Chinese philosophy, and its colors have a unique concept system.Taoism advocates “the beauty of simplicity”, in the color that “the color, white and five colors into carry on. Taoist, a stand and all things born carry on,” advocating the use of monochrome, back to basics.Xie He of the Southern Qi Dynasty put forward the idea of “attaching color to class” in the Six Methods of Painting, believing that painters should get rid of the original color of the object and grasp the commonality of color when painting.

When we study the natural imagery form, we are not studying the texture of a certain object, we want the texture to be extracted as a visual form, and under the control of the rhythm of the overall picture, it forms a certain kind of thing that can decipher the spiritual emotion of a person. The expressive power of texture and color is the same, but form has even stronger visual impact.The existence of texture is dependent on the form, as it can change with the form.In oil painting, the form and texture of the house, tree, road, and other imagery are very important in the picture.Using concrete objects as a reference for detailed depiction is an expressive feature of figurative painting.

The feeling of imagery begins from the visual senses of the painter, from the painter’s perceptual experience of the real world, with a lot of traces of the real world. Imaginative oil painting focuses on the expression of the mood, which can show the external appearance of things, but also can convey the inner spiritual temperament of things, and can also express the author’s aesthetic feeling towards the objective things as well as the subjective thoughts and feelings. Painters have the option to emphasize or weaken a certain aspect based on their artistic personality and artistic pursuit. Due to the different artistic personalities and artistic pursuits of the painters, the differences in painting styles and the different imagery presented on the screen, the different artistic styles show the different personalities of the artists, the different emotions expressed, the different understanding of the objects, and the different possibilities of painting brought about by such differences.

4.1.1

The unique role of the house in the picture

People’s houses were built on the mountains and along the water, and there would be villages of different sizes in the depression in the middle of two big mountains, which were built on the mountains and distributed in the depression in the form of strips. These houses are indispensable as a form factor in painting.

In Zhao Kaikun’s “Jewelry Village” oil painting, the shape of the house and the relationship between the houses as shown in Figure 1, we put the sparseness of the houses gathered and dispersed changes, simplified into the shape of the point will be seen more clearly, the 11 points correspond to the position of the house in the picture, we can clearly see the relationship between them and the distribution of the situation, the three largest points in the forefront of the picture position, there is a kind of picture outward break free of the force, especially the point on the right side of the picture, the picture is the most important point, and it is the most important point in the picture. Especially the points on the right side of the screen, a small portion has run out of the screen, but the internal tendency force is holding them, which is the characteristic of the points. Rhythm of the point changes form style will bring you and a special kind of face, sometimes the rhythm of the painting through certain factors in the picture, in different parts of the size of the change, the strength of the change in the sparse and dense, this alternation of the constant flashing, how do you control this alternation of the factors (similar to the same factors) rhythm control is to produce a visually interesting way, at this time the characteristics of the point is more obvious. It gives a change of rhythm. The roof of the house in this painting appears mostly as a triangle, which echoes the houses on the far right and far left of the picture.The form of this house ridge is enhanced by five changes of angle in the picture alone.The changes in the inner quality of the dots in these tables can seldom draw attention to themselves.

Figure 1.

The shape of the house and the relationship between the house

4.1.2

Tree form and branching

Zhao Kaikun’s “Spring Wind and Willow” oil painting in the form of trees and branches as shown in Figure 2, in the center of the picture at the top of a large form, and the other four forms in the position of the relationship between the rhythm to find a balance, although their size of the outer contour of the form are very different, but they all have a common feature, is their directionality, their form has been tilted at 45 degrees or so, so that directionality of the spring wind blowing the willow moving Such directionality shows the mood of spring wind blowing willow, but in order to make the picture balanced and not let people feel that the wind is blowing the willow, the willow tree in the upper left corner of the form of the party is tilted to the left, so that the picture has a kind of conflict and balance, so that the picture was established, the meaning of the visual force in the search for a variety of visual forms and at the same time to achieve a balanced visual effect, balanced and not stagnant. In this painting the trunks of the trees form the main elements of the picture, the two trees at the front of the picture, the beam of the door and the horizon line divide the rectangular picture, and in the picture that I have refined and simplified to only a few straight lines, we can clearly see the visual effect that the two trees have caused to the picture. First the tree on the left destroys the serenity of the picture by drawing its own sphere of influence, and the tree on the right similarly draws its own sphere of influence in order to find a force to counterbalance the one on the left. In this way, there are three seemingly independent forces in the picture, and within each of them, there are forces of different sizes that divide them to achieve an overall balance in the picture.Some personal observations need to be made here.

Figure 2.

The form and branch of the tree

4.1.3

Roads in the village

The road in Zhao Kaikun’s “Spring Green” is shown in Figure 3. In landscape paintings, the road is the most direct visual element that expresses the space, and in the initial sketching, it is always very simple to deal with it, just treating it as a “road” in the picture. The road can be a big “white space” or a line, which has already been mentioned, and it is the form in the picture. In this painting, in the front of the picture, except for the fence, there is mainly a road, and there is also a road on top of the fence. After I decompose the picture, these two ordinary dirt roads in the village are very important parts of the artist’s picture. In the decomposition of the picture, the two black triangles is simplified road, these two big and small triangles, the first feeling is the sense of direction, this sense of direction of the inner force, so that people’s vision is very natural, along with their guidance to the picture of the triangle at the very top of the picture, that is, the picture, the distant view of the nipple of the mountain. This pushes out the space of the whole picture. This is inseparable from the inner tension and directionality of the triangles.

Figure 3.

The road in the village of the temple

The scattered village houses, interlaced with woods and vines, make the composition of the picture less compact. The asymmetrical layout of the jumbled composition has already revealed a slightly subtle sense of beauty.Using one’s own subjective consciousness to create, let the final modeling language reveals a kind of unclear unfinished state, so as to achieve a kind of “seeming and unseeming” feeling, which is the imagery. You can also choose to use your left hand to paint in a non-conventional and non-habitual way, this kind of unaccustomed direct expression, there is no previous fixed mode of painting habits, break the previous habits of creation, stimulate the creation of its own subjective factors, may form an unexpected and accidental picture vision.

The different symbolic meanings of the 14 types of imagery in the West and China are shown in Table 1, which shows that the same flower has different symbolic meanings due to cultural differences, and reflects the many differences in culture. The symbolism of the same flower varies due to cultural differences, which reflect the many cultural differences. The differences in cultural concepts also lead to different forms of artistic expression of plants. In Western oil paintings, plants in traditional subjects are mostly used as still life props, so artists pay more attention to and express the relationship between the shape and color of plants and the objective environment from an intuitive point of view. In Western modern oil painting, on the other hand, it is the other way around. Through the analysis of the inner structure of plants, the most essential painting elements are extracted, combined, and recreated in an abstract form.However, Chinese oil painting has always used the attitude of “similar and dissimilar” to express the various plants experienced by the painter and the cultural connotation in a freehand way, so this has led to the same kind of plant, in different eras, the painter used almost the same way to express it, and finally formed a cultural symbol, and developed into the artist’s aesthetic expression of the symbol.

On the other hand, the West has a strong religious cultural tradition, believing in the existence of the Creator, focusing on the discovery of the transcendental character of the aesthetic object and linking this with “Deity” and “God”, art for religious services, a large number of religious themes in oil paintings.These oil paintings are mainly based on biblical stories, myths, and legends, and have a strong narrative. Therefore, the plant imagery appearing in these religious oil paintings is mostly allegorical and has special symbolic meaning. In China, since the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, a whole set of classical aesthetics with special terms of expression has been formed, such as: breath, rhyme, wind, bone, flavor, God, wonderful and so on. Oil painting also focuses on discovering the empirical function of the aesthetic object, and often connects this with the moral and ethical aspects of humanistic color.The Western religious cultural tradition holds that there is a Creator and that man needs to follow the world created by the Creator.

Chinese flower and bird paintings are lyrical, praising nature and sharing the common life value of “the unity of heaven and mankind”. Westerners mainly focus on the external formal attributes of the aesthetic object, while China mainly focuses on the psychological experience of the aesthetic subject, which leads to the fact that the West focuses on the discovery of the transcendental character of the aesthetic object and often connects it with the religious “Deity” and “God”, while China focuses on the discovery of the empirical function of the aesthetic object and often connects it with the religious ‘God” and “God”. This also leads to the fact that the West focuses on discovering the transcendental character of the aesthetic object and often associates it with “God” and “God” with religious color, while China focuses on discovering the empirical function of the aesthetic object and often associates it with morality and ethics with human color. “A flower is a world”, in a small flower can reflect the whole world.However, the way of viewing is different, then the way of understanding the world is also different. Western realistic painters see matter, impressionist painters see light, abstract painters see composition …… Chinese people see the spirit of personality and the interest of life in flowers, reflecting the aesthetic characteristics beyond the physical object. However, life, and the sense of life, which is common to both Chinese and Western art, is what art works are pursuing.

In this study, the fitting of each natural element in the oil paintings to the beauty degree value found that the fitting results, as shown in Figure 4, showed that the effect of natural elements on the beauty degree value reached the level of significance. There is a highly significant positive effect of natural elements on the beauty degree value (P<0.001), and the natural element heterogeneity has a strong explanatory power for the changes in the beauty degree value.

Figure 4.

The effect of natural elements on oil painting

Nowadays, with the rapid development of the network era, the relationship between contemporary painting and traditional social thought is undergoing a transformation, a tug-of-war between tradition and innovation, promoting many painters and philosophers to inquire about the harmonious relationship between man and nature. Art is not about painting specimens in a botanical garden. The approach to oil painting of natural elements should be to reject repetition and design according to known ways, but to transcend and reproduce nature, retaining traditional conceptual influences but also exorcising lagging concepts, fusing traditional ideas with those coming from the artist’s mindset, and expressing humanistic meanings and philosophical ideas more explicitly. At the same time, modern forms are fused into one. Borrowing natural objects, imitating natural shapes, and transmitting natural moods, the paintings nurture the thoughts and experiences of nature and human beings.

The survey was conducted by visiting thirteen public places (the questionnaire was based on the age segmentation method proposed by the United Nations Health Organization (WHO)), and the population was classified into the following categories according to age: children (under 17 years of age). Young adults (18 to 40 years old). Middle-aged and older adults (41 to 65 years old). Elderly (over 66 years old). The total number of people surveyed was 389, and the results of the survey are shown in Figure 5. The survey shows the concern of various groups of people regarding natural elemental oil paintings.It can be seen that, except for children, the remaining three types of survey population (which account for 20.9% of the average value) expressed their liking and appreciation for the natural elements used in creating oil paintings.

Figure 5.

The attention of natural image painting