Gu Weijing recognized the origin of the painted mural in front of him.
As a very classic Buddhist mural, the image of worshiping the Buddha and protecting the Dharma is a relatively common shape in the mural groups influenced by the Eastern Xia cultural circle such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Southeast, Yunnan and Guizhou, Myanmar, and Thailand.
This mural is about two meters wide and one meter high. The scenes in the picture are detailed and the characters are rich. There are not only Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, goddesses, and protector kings, but also human kings and queens, accompanying concubines, and even little ghosts and There are many lions, tigers, leopards and other animals listening to Zen at the feet of Guanyin.
But it is a great pity that this painting is incomplete.
A huge crack peeled off from the left and penetrated the goddess with plump skin and solemn expression, the maid holding a flower bowl, the queen slowly walking forward with her hands clasped together, and a group of concubines holding flags behind them, and even a Guanyin master. one side of the cheek.
Gu Weijing shook his head regretfully. These scars directly destroyed the shape of this exquisite mural.
Myanmar’s cultural relics and historic sites have suffered several disasters.
The Dunhuang murals of the Eastern Xia Dynasty were very heartbreakingly damaged during the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, and a large number of scroll paintings were bought by Western adventurers.
The same thing is by no means rare in modern Southeast Asia. Similar things still happen in the Buddhist monastery ruins and murals in ancient cities such as Bagan in eastern Myanmar.
Especially in many cases, a large number of foreign tourists and locals have imperfect awareness of cultural relics protection, which makes the preservation of cultural relics more difficult.
Gu Weijing is not a cultural relics expert. Even if he is a painter, it is still very heartbreaking for him to see such exquisite monuments destroyed.
"You can actually receive such a difficult task?"
Gu Weijing shook his head, quickly opened the manuscript notebook in his hand, and roughly browsed the restoration plan for the mural based on the contents above.
This kind of mural, with a small part disappearing directly, is the most difficult to repair.
The cracks in the painting completely destroyed the overall beauty of the mural, but more than 80% of the original mural color remained intact.
It is a wasteful crime to directly cover and repaint such mural monuments.
There are generally three different treatments.
It is possible to carry out only protective restoration and no artistic restoration. This method can be considered the simplest by adding a wooden keel frame or the like.
If the process is more complicated, the current common practice in developed European countries is to fill in the soil layer in the broken spaces of the murals, and then cover it with a thin layer of light-colored paint that is similar to the surrounding color. This method is called For the shadow line method.
The hatching method is one of the commonly used techniques in Western mural restoration in recent years. It was proposed by Italian art restoration scholar Cesare Brandi.
In the restoration of murals, he advocated "making the incomplete part the background of the painting instead of the other way around" and proposed using spaced lines to weaken the relationship between light and dark in the completed part to reflect the identifiable relationship with the whole.
In recent years, this technique has also begun to appear in the restoration process of oriental silk calligraphy and painting and Dunhuang murals.
Its advantage is that it can ensure that the original paintings and calligraphy are not damaged, but its disadvantage is that it will leave obvious traces of repair, just like a few drops of light blue sea water appearing in a deep blue ocean, which can be seen at a glance The difference between the two.
The most difficult thing is to completely repair without leaving any trace, trying to restore the original appearance of the painting using pigments in an original way.
This method has obvious advantages compared to the first two, and it completely gives the mural a new life.
But why is this method less commonly used?
The reason is that it is too difficult.
If it is not done well, the post-repair will have repeated color differences from the original picture, and it will look like the cream on a person's face has not been spread.
The so-called dog tail continues the ferret, nothing more than that.
This mural uses the third most difficult craft.
Gu Weijing flipped through the signatures on the manuscript. The name of the person directly responsible for this mural was signed by Cao Xuan. Mr. Cao was directly responsible for this painting.
At this time, the blank space of Mural No. 17 in front of me has been filled with broken repair clay, and someone has used exquisite craftsmanship to redraw the broken ink lines with a brush and repair it.
The cracks in the mural leave only blank spaces waiting to be painted.
The artist's line drawing restoration skills are very exquisite and amazing.
That’s not to say that there are no problems with the repaired brushstrokes, but that they are 100% perfect.
Rather, its art style maintains a very high consistency with the original mural, both in terms of the technique of using the brush and the shades of the ink lines.
Except that the color appears slightly thicker because the ink line has just dried.
Judging from Gu Weijing's perspective, which was blessed by "Mojie Notes", he could not see traces of acquired repairs.
Every artist has his own unique style, and the person who repaired this mural was able to completely integrate his style into the style of the original monument, which is amazing.
For the restoration of cultural relics, truth is more important than good. In other words, it is really the best thing.
"I don't know whether it was Mr. Cao's disciples who drew lines on the manuscript on the wall, or whether Mr. Cao wrote it himself."
Gu Weijing took out the color palette and began to experiment with color mixing.
Restoring a mural with a complex composition and a large number of different characters and color changes is a big challenge even for him after owning "The Notes of Mojie".
He wrote very carefully, even hesitantly.
For a moment, Gu Weijing did doubt that given the difficulty of this mural, this was not a mural restoration work that he could have done originally.
He never thought that anyone was going to harm him, but he just wondered if the staff had been negligent.
However, opportunities are rare.
His hands were really itchy.
There is a more important reason, he is a painter.
He didn't think anyone could do a better job at mixing paints than he, who had obtained "The Notes of Mojie".
No matter how many concerns he had in his heart, Gu Weijing did not want to make a painting worse when he could obviously do it well. That would be a blasphemy against art.
This is the self-cultivation that allows the Gu family to hold a paintbrush in hand from generation to generation no matter how the external situation changes.
"Azurite, blue juice, copper barium powder..."
No, this color is still a bit thick.
"Perhaps adding a little zinc white and clam powder might be more appropriate?"
…
Square, Buddha worship activities.
Watching the water flowing in front of the altar representing the zodiac sign, and amid the chanting of Buddhist scriptures by the monks on one side, a peaceful and peaceful smile appeared on Mr. Cao's originally serious face.
Many painters, especially older painters, choose religious beliefs to gain spiritual peace.
There is a saying that there are no atheists in the trenches of constant panic. This sentence is also applicable to artists whose spiritual world is always ups and downs.
Art and religion have something in common in the way they understand and grasp the world.
British esthetician Clive Bell wrote in his book "Art" that art and religion are two ways for people to escape from the real environment and reach a state of ecstasy. Aesthetic ecstasy and religious fervor are two factions united together. Art and religion are both means of achieving the same kind of psychological state.
The art industry is prone to lunatics. If the spirit is not strong enough, it is easy to become withdrawn and weird.
It is common to suddenly cry or curse in the process of painting.
Every painter who is struggling to make progress on the road of art has experienced similar encounters——
Either the critic will be dissatisfied with the painting, or I will be dissatisfied with it.
The art critic is dissatisfied when he is satisfied, and he is dissatisfied when the critic is satisfied.
Finally, I was satisfied with it, and the critics were also satisfied, but the market was not satisfied.
In addition to the art itself, these are all important reasons why artists suffer from insomnia, tossing and turning, hair loss, and anger.
This is especially true for young painters who are still struggling.
In fact, at Mr. Cao's age and status, no outsider can tell him anything. The only one who can make him feel irritated and dissatisfied is himself.
Mural No. 17 was an important reason why he was in a bad mood.
Hundreds of years have passed, and ancient painters and modern painters use different pigments and configure them in different ways.
Not to mention, there are various signs of erosion and weathering caused by the passage of time.
Even with the most modern computer scanning analysis, it is difficult to avoid subtle color changes during the pigment mixing process.
At this time, it is more useful to rely on human experience.
However, no matter how superb Mr. Cao's skills are, he cannot completely restore the skills of ancient painters hundreds of years ago, especially the combination of paints.
They can only be close, they can only be infinitely similar, but they cannot be the same.
Whether it is the light and dark changes in color or the texture of paint, it is actually difficult to compare with those ancient painters whose father and son had secret recipes passed down from generation to generation.
In the preparation period before starting the project, Mr. Cao also anticipated possible problems by studying scanned photos and conducting several field visits.
He had drawn sketches and several different color schemes based on photos in advance.
However, after the mural restoration project actually started, there were still some differences from his expectations.
Although this color level difference has almost reached the point where it is difficult to detect it unless the naked eye observes it closely.
But for Mr. Cao, difference means difference.
If he only pursues the same goal, there is no need to host this project.
This made the little old man a little irritable, and he proposed early that he would come to worship the Buddha in the afternoon.
"I hope the Bodhisattva can bring me good luck." Mr. Cao thought.
