Posted on 04/16/2018 5:48:00 PM PDT by mairdie
A move across a 39 foot scroll painted by 18 year old Wang Ximeng (1096–1119). Wang was a prodigy, and one of the most renowned court painters of the Northern Song period, taught personally by Emperor Huizong of Song. Wang died at the age of 23
From "Wild Geese Descend on Level Sand" on Eleven Centuries of Traditional Music of China.
YouTube compresses the heck out of a video and that turns moves jerky. To download a copy of this video BEFORE YouTube did its thing, download the 226 MB video at:
http://www.iment.com/maida/tv/songvids/mp4/misc/Fine-Arts-Wang-Ximeng-YTV-V19.mp4
The videos are zipped. I unzip with a double click and play them with VLC.
The full set of downloadable Fine Arts videos are at:
http://www.iment.com/maida/tv/songvids/fine-art-videos.htm
PING
This is quite stunning, when compared with the Western painting and music of the same time. Makes one wonder whether the effect of the Dark Ages is still with us, infecting everything. Why was central Africa so far behind in accomplishment than Egypt? Why has it remained so?
The utube art w/Baez video was also quite captivating. I had no idea that she performed stuff of that nature.
I’m so very glad you liked it. The art is simply stunning in these periods. I’ve captured 131 artists and I’m sorting them into dynasties to give an overall view of ancient Chinese art. They’re incredibly different from ours because they have a different purpose - they’re expressing the character of the artist and that of the person examining them. Major nuance just on how light or heavy the ink is stroked onto the paper. I remember being taught that the ideal person to rub the ink stick was a 13 year old virgin because they had the right strength to get the ink rubbed smoothly and the patience to not leave chunks.
There were almost more art critiques written than paintings created, I’m starting to think. MAJOR sophistication. Another point of confusion is that we see copying done in European art during an artist’s learning period. In ancient China, famous artists copied older artists’ work to spread it through the country. So you’re looking at Sung paintings of Tang artists.
Never took a class in African art. Zip knowledge. I had classes in Roman/Greek and Middle Eastern. Iranian art up to the time of Darius. That sort of thing.
I don’t know that Baez did all that many pieces that were so strangely operatic, but that’s where I first heard that song and I’ve loved it ever since. It had the right strangeness to go with the surrealists.
The surrealistic images popped the memories I had of my undergraduate days back in the mid- to late-fifties, especially the Dali work that was on display at the Art School there. But also I have been remembering the musical artists across the spectrum that were also brought to us there.
When I kind of flunked out, but a few years later entered an engineering school and was successful at it, the school combined both views of the ceramics field, design as well as manufacturing. We had the advantage of a state-funded library that had lots of books and current magazines following the latest trends in art and architecture. I spent a lot of time there with the accessible materials to the whole ongoing modern shemes of the time, that are just now long ago and far away.
Thanks for taking the time to wake up a few of us with your selections. Memories . . . the days when we were young, fresh, daring, and -- beautiful in body, if not in mind. Some parts of it were bad indeed.
I saw the original a couple of years ago. Along with it the have the digital copy that you can scan through and zoom in on.
Mary,
Thank you for another wonderful treat. Is the instrument playing the “Erhu” (one-stringed instrument)? Beautiful harmony between the images and the music you chose. I enjoyed it.
I worked in China in a very remote region on the Yangtze River in the fall/winter/spring of ‘76-’77. The peasant villages, buildings, and boats looked a lot like what you see in that painting. The main difference was that everybody wore Mao suits in that era.
I’m 73, so I was an undergrad ‘62-7. Started in Physics and in my 4th year lost it on Schroedinger Equations. Screaming loudly, I ran into Art history for the next year and a half. THEN I got into computers. But the memories are still fresh.
Grandmother had studied with the sculptor Lorado Taft at the Art Institute in 1909, and mother and I both studied in his studio at U of Chicago. I can almost remember the smell of the place. Music had moved into folk music, so nothing so avant-garde as what you were experiencing.
Those were the days of boys writing you poetry and songs that they played on their guitars. I lived in the art library surrounded by open books, but it’s nothing to what I can get now online. That time gave me the love. This time gives me knowledge like a fire hydrant.
But the art instructors were wonderful. I had Father Harrie Vanderstappen for oriental art and medieval art with Norman Rosenthal. Brilliant teachers. Though Rosenthal really got to me when he described trying to identify a sculpture on a church by examining the quarry payroll records to tie a block of stone to a particular artist.
And yet I can spend years today examining how a particular poet favors particular word combinations that move their tongues in particular ways.
That’s AMAZING!
The copy I’m working from was 39,974x1600 to fit in 1280x720. The file was too big to be taken into EITHER Photoshop OR Adobe Premiere. The only way to keep a continuous move was to divide the file in half, exactly match the two pieces in the middle of the music TO THE PIXEL, and use a pause to make the move across the two pieces. That took awhile.
What an incredible experience. It must have been major culture shock.
I assumed from college on that all of those landscapes were fantasy and just a style. Then I watched a movie on China and had my jaw drop at actually seeing the reality of those landscapes. WHAT a country! It’s like the Grand Canyon times 10.
It was like being transported back 2,000 years. Men hauling barges up the Yangtze by pulling tow-ropes like you see in the painting.
I truly don’t know. I’m sorry. But the whole album is on YouTube. That piece is at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZRuqsGoFjQ&list=PLLi1rI7Fa-lwm3yYnBryEC-P_zvnmHJM1&index=4
I’m so glad you liked it. I played a lot of music to find a match. I’ve got the next piece for the run across all the dynasties. And I’m pretty sure I’ve got the right music for Shang and Chou bronzes. I’m hoping to do a few showing off one dynasty at a time.
There are two other versions of that painting on YouTube. 8 and 10 min. One of them is a straight move that is so slow it’s great for insomniacs. The other is an art piece of dissolving images that seems to be the Chinese version of German Expressionism. Neither has music I enjoyed, but the German Expressionist one seemed to be someone recording themselves VERY strangely. Seemed there was still room for something simple with music that actually had a melody.
Ping
It’s rather humbling that things can stay the same for so very long. If I had some live footage of those mountains, it would be very tempting to dissolve between video and the paintings.
Wonderful artist.
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