The Sunset Dyes the Whole Forest with Color
This is the roughly translated title of this piece
Title Information | | Character | Pinyin | Meaning |
 | céng | Level
Sunset |
 | lín | Small Forest |
 | jìn | All
Everything |
 | rǎn | Dyes
Colors |
This is a beautiful piece with a wonderful sunset silhouetting the trees as a flock of birds make their final flight before darkness prevails. From the background, the sun dyes this small forest a beautiful orange color before disappearing below the horizon.
Chinese lesson: If you look carefully at the character for "lin"
which means "small forest", you will see that the Chinese character is actually two trees linked together. You can still see some of the original images in which the meanings of Chinese characters came from - even thousands of years after these characters were created. Another Chinese character meaning "big forest" consists three linked trees.
This hand-painted artwork is from the
Xiao Meng Asian Art Collection
The artists of this collection are actually a married couple who travel around China together looking for subjects to paint. Their real names are Chen Yong Ping and Chen Wei Ling but they sign all of their work under the single pen name Xiao Meng.
They work as a team on most of these paintings. One of them does the background and the other will handle the detail work on each painting.
The artists take great pride in the fact that they have developed their own unique painting style which they call "hazy painting" (this is roughly translated - it sounds better in Chinese).
They use a combination of "freehand style" and "elaborate style" in their paintings. The background is done using broad fast strokes and spray with very thin paint. The foreground (cranes) are done with a lot of detail using a delicate technique with a very fine brush.
