It’s not easy to position watercolor painting in modern easel painting movement, because since the 15th century, most western painters, except for English ones, have constrained watercolor painting in the creation of small samples and color drafts. Therefore, it’s off the mainstream of painting and is commonly called “marginalized painting”. Representatives of early time was Van Dyck with his egg white watercolor painting, later, Roseau of the Barbizon school, the 18th century, Gustave Courbet, and Cezanne, the Impressionist Master, Picasso, the enthusiast of modern art movement etc. They often used connivent watercolor painting in their creation of original prototype small releases of oil-painting, which left numerous classic art works of watercolor painting to the later generations, completely expressing the aesthetic meaning of the form study of art works.

As a result, Professor Chen Peirong, after absorbing the essence of western art of watercolor painting, established his own style. Although he has been admiring the veiled magnificence and splendidness of English painter Turner’s painting, he loves John Constable’s style more. The realm reflected from the drawing paper which reaches one’s bottom of heart impressed him. “ This is the intrinsic charm of watercolor painting”, he said.

Of course, the stylization of art of any form would certainly hinder the development of artists’ personality and the formation of his distinctive art style, of which, catering to the fashion is the great killer of art creation. Professor Chen mentioned he knew that when he was learning painting in his early days. Besides learning from Western art masters, he particularly paid attention to the domestic grand master Li Yongsen’s watercolor painting, which was neat, precise and delicate, and the famous painter Ha Ding’s elegant, clean and distinct painting style. And he was also influenced by the famous sculptor Zhang Chongren in terms of watercolor painting. Professor Chen remarked: “the art of watercolor painting must be lubricated by water, without which the charm connected with it and the aesthetic flavor would be absent.”  He is opposed to the machinery kind painting with dry and mixed features, and has always believed there’s no much academic sense in it by simply applying some watercolor painting skills. To explain it further, he cited an example:“The landscape painting painted with the Mogu skill (a Chinese painting skill which applies ink or colors to large sections of a paint ) in Ming and Qing Dynasty, paintings of Yun Nantian, a famous figure painter, Xu Gu and Ren Bonian, with the creational utility of ink color, all posses the beauty and rhyme of water. Their paintings, with objective things as targets and done with assistant painting skills, show intangible, graceful, profound and dignified aesthetic effect. “Thus, they have poeticized and meaningful artistic conception” he said. And this is the spirit of watercolor painting.

The Beauty is a work done with Chinese ink spread on the paper and was entitled “the excellent work” in The Ninth National Arts Exhibition. The gradient of thick black and white colors makes the tender peony on the paper bloom with filmy beauty, which refreshes our daily life. It’s neither from the painter’s casual sketches and sketches from nature, nor deliberately-made delicate depiction. Professor Chen explained: “ I just applied ink to its acme and it naturally created the special effect of watercolor painting. Of course, the subject must be the one I like.”

The beauty

From 1990s, he started to paint The Flowers series. In his representative work pure and noble，there’s the proper use of freehand brushwork with illusory and rich flavor, with no secular coquetry of being sappy, schmaltzy and sentimental, which is very scarce in today’s Chinese watercolor painting circle. The paint structure is done bravely and innovatively, with gradually changed light and shadow. It reflects both the objective side of Western painting and the mysterious world of Eastern one, the integration of which creates a kind of proud yet reserved aristocratic atmosphere. Its creator Professor Chen plays an very important role in today’s watercolor painting circle in China.

 Pure and Noble

Chen deems that subject matter like flowers is of random, popular and universal features, with relatively narrow choices of the content, for there’s no regional differences in it, which inevitably intensifies people’s sense of participation in aesthetic appreciation and the   aesthetic value of which recognized by the society is apparently higher than others of strict requirements of locality. He emphasized that the virtualized and misty style of flower shape was designed to invoke people’s past experience and memory of features, which to some extent reduplicated experimental aesthetics, completely different from the reproduced art. Thus, although the flowers under his paintbrush are static, they present a kind of distant and evocative feature, like flowing water in shape and also resembling flying swan goose. The contrast of falsehood and reality and the blend of colors make the painting magnificent and gorgeous. This can be the painter’s an ingenious interpretation of painting flowers. Today, being flashy and secular is the common defect in domestic field of watercolor painting, which also impedes the development of other kinds of painting, like oil painting. Chen believes that although English watercolor painting, with its hundreds of years long history, has its special aesthetic and social value, compared with it, the landscape painting of Fan Kuan and Li Chen in the Yuan Dynasty as well as of Ma Yuan and Xia Gui in the Song Dynasty carried our national culture and humanistic spirit, which indicates China’s contemporary watercolors doesn’t lag behind Western ones. After all, concentration only on the practice with light and shadow makes the modern art lack of the due experimental property, which is contrary to the current international trend of art. However, let bygones be bygones. They are not the painting principles accepted by Professor Chen. Perhaps his long years of art teaching practice and art designing career make him pay extraordinary attention to the modern visual effects of formative arts. He thinks watercolor painting with mediocre content, single expression technique and sketching-from-life style the often leads to the out-dated manner of making it simple or complex as it should be. Conversely, “ Establish conception first, then create the image” is the prerequisite for innovation, which makes painting unflashy but accumulate a kind of vigorous beauty, forming an unique style for the painter.  　

Ancient people commented that the melody will fly far from the flute and the beauty of the painting is beyond the paper. As for the watercolor of Professor Chen, it has a kind of virtual and remote beauty of water rhyme.