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Chinese Art
Teacher's Resource
Lesson Plan: Traditional Chinese Painting (click here
for a related site)
Lessons submitted by: Patti Burkhardt
Goal:
These various activities will ready Grades PreK-12 students
for their visit to the Naples Art Museum where the Gow
Collection will be explored. Two lessons are included: one for Grades
PreK-5 and one for Grades 6-12. Additionally,
two on-site lessons in techniques for viewing Chinese art, in fact,
any art collection, are included for use by students while touring the
collection at the museum. They are titled
Thoughts,
teaching students how to question the meaning of art, and Perspective,
a discussion of the different manner of handling relative distance in
Chinese versus Western art.
Background Information:
Traditional Chinese
painting does not rely on drawing technique alone. It is part of a 3000-year-old
culture in which painting is intermingled with the arts of music,
calligraphy,
poetry, and religion.
Traditional Chinese
painting is based on line, not form. There are two broad styles of painting:
gongbi (fine brush) and xieyi
(free brush). Fine brush is primarily an outline drawing, with decorative
colors added. Free brush is spontaneous in nature. However, both rely
on the total mastery of line. (
Nan, 1997)
During the Eastern Tsin Dynasty (A.D. 317-420), Hsieh Ho,
an artist and the first art critic in Chinese history, established the
Six Laws of Painting. These are translated as:
- Vitality resonates
from a painting.
- Use bone manner,
or brushstrokes that are confident, strong and elastic.
- Capture the
forms of nature's objects, or sketch nature with the intent to capture
its forms and spirits
- Apply color
to each object's category; i.e., colors are uniform according to their
category.
- Properly place
the objects to make a well-organized composition.
- Transfer a
master's techniques, learn from the masters by copying and analyzing
their artwork.
The first law is
the most significant. It seeks to blend the artist's spirit with the
rhythmic vitality of nature. A great painting should not only demonstrate
outstanding technique, but should also express harmony and vitality.
(
Zhen, 2000)
When Chinese people go into the countryside to look at phenomena, they
are not only admiring the scenery, but also hoping that they will absorb
some of the strength of the mountain or the vitality of the waterfall.
Gu Kaizhi (345-406) once said, "Form exists in order to
express spirit." (
Nan, 1997)
Suggested resources:
http://www.newton.mec.edu/Angier/DimSum/Chinese
Caligraphy Lesson.html [yes, calligraphy is misspelled in this URL]
There are two lessons
which share this background information:
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