Paper Painting

Among the Vietnamese plastic arts, wood engraving is a long standing traditional one. We have inherited from our ancients from Dong Ho village a valuable tradition of wood engraving in colour. These engravings are appreciated by generation to generation and have become an indispensable moral alimentation. Dong Ho images have their place deep in the soul of the people and their features have kept their sharpness in spite of the upheavals of the times.

With colour as red as peony, as yellow as ripe paddy, as green as a young rice plant the images have by themselves the taste of rural areas in all their characteristic rusticity.

The engraving is always performed on the wood of persimon-tree, which is solf and does not swell when dipped in water. In printing, starch plays an important role. Mixed with starch a colouring matter forms a solid and clear paste suitable for creation. Besides, scallop shells give a typically Vietnamese gleam and constitute a decorative element of printed pictures of a very simple treatment. The genre of painting on paper using gouache, water colour, pastel, ink, colour pencils, drawing charcoal, sauce occupies an important position in Vietnamese painting. In many cases, these pictures have been works of great artistical value, and what is particularly precious is that they have expressed the direct sensations of the painter before the objects, sensations that cannot be repeated. Quite a few of these painters have thus created representative works contributing to the different stages of the history of painting. Sy Tot has created the best of his gouache in the All children can study. The composition of the picture is pyramidal, the drawing without artifice, each figure is set off by light. It is surprising that Sy Tot's style highly resembles that of Le Nain, although Sy Tot has not even known Le Nain and his style stems merely from his intuition.

Source: From "Vietnam Contemporary Art", 1996 

By The Hanoi Fine Arts Publisher

Folk Paintings

Folk paintings are a combination of traditional cultural values with ancient artistic methods that have been created through the labour of past generations. There are two types of Vietnamese folk paintings, Tet (Lunar New Year Festival) paintings and worshipping paintings.

The Vietnamese believe in ancestor worship and the deification of natural phenomena, both of which are reflected in the paintings.

Due to their historical popularity, the folk paintings were produced in large quantities. This high demand was met through the use of the woodblock carving printing technique, which has been practiced by the Vietnamese for many centuries. During the Ly Dynasty (12th century), there were many families who specialised in woodblock carving. By the end of the Tran Dynasty, they were also printing paper money. At the beginning of the Le So Dynasty, the Chinese technique of carving printing boards was adopted and improved. The History Museum and the Fine Art Museum in Hanoi still keep old printing boards as archives.

During the Mac Dynasty (16th century), folk paintings developed quite extensively and were popular among the aristocracy in Thang Long. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the art of folk painting was stable and highly developed.

Depending on artistic style, drawing-printing technique, and the materials used, folk paintings are classified into painting trends according to the name of their place of production.

Each style of painting is different. However, in all the styles, shapes are created based on the concept of don tuyen binh do (single line-simple designs), which uses lines to bend the coloured shapes and to make a border for the picture. Another method used is thuan tay hay mat (easy to draw and to see). With this design form, the folk paintings do not depend on the rules of perspective. The deities are large and take the upper positions, while the ordinary people are drawn on a smaller scale and the size of the animals and the natural scenery depicted depends on their relationship to the sentiment or story being expressed. These unique characteristics make the paintings profoundly impressive.

As a result of cultural exchange, Vietnamese folk paintings have retained and developed certain traditional aspects. As well, the paintings have been influenced and enriched by the genius of other painting styles. One exception is Dong Ho paintings, which continue to exist unchanged against the challenges of time.

Source: tracevietnam

Silk painting in terminal condition

Long Me (Mother's Heart) - Le Pho

At a time when many arts are enjoying a resurgence based on increasing prosperity and greater market demand, it was a very drastic and shocking thing to say.

Famous silk painter Nguyen Thu told The Thao & Van Hoa (Sports and Culture) newspaper: “Let me put it this way. Silk painting has died.” This could be taken as an over-the-top, emotional statement, but there were others hinting at the same thing. 

An artist who has worked for a long time on silk paintings recently said the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts had few silk painting students. And a teacher who has taught silk painting for the past 20 years also said that since the National Fine Arts Exhibition in 1995, the number of silk paintings done has dropped, as have the quantity and quality of awards given in the field.

Artists said the lack of patience, a dearth of talent and the favor for explicit expression are factors threatening to affect the demise of Vietnamese silk paintings.

Luong Xuan Doan, a student of Nguyen Thu and one of the winners at the National Silk Painting Exhibition in 1980, said “I’m stuck. I no longer have an undisturbed mind to be able to paint on silk.”

For painting on silk, the artist “needs real peace – of thought and emotions,” Doan said. “I have turned my status into ‘paint fast’ – which is not suitable for silk painting.” He said silk paintings do not allow the artists to hide their mistakes or carelessness, which can be concealed in other art forms. For instance, a lacquer painting uses layers of colors or extra relief items that can be used to hide or cover up initial errors, he explained. “With silk, everything is on one flat surface. Silk is where the talent, the skill or the shortcomings of an artist are exposed most clearly.”

Doan said silk paintings can “totally demonstrate” any modern style, including realist, abstract, geometric or surrealist, but it takes real talent to do it. He said silk painting was facing a dead-end as the effort to find a new way of expression is discouraging young people from taking up the art form.

Hai Ngo (Picked corn) - Pham Kim Hoa

Hanoi-based painter Phan Cam Thuong agreed with Doan, saying young painters are no longer interested in silk paintings as they want to paint realistically, which is difficult to achieve on silk. Thuong said silk painting is confined by the requirements of being blurred, vague, picky on colors and not contrastive.

Thuong said silk painters in recent years didn’t use natural colors like in traditional silk paintings because it takes time and effort. They used water colors, which technically meant dyeing the silk and could ruin the painting in around 50 years.

The oldest silk paintings kept in Vietnam are the 15th-century portrait of Nguyen Trai, an illustrious historian, poet, tactician and politician, and more than ten portraits done in the 19th century.

Silk paintings began prospering in Vietnam only when the Dong Duong (Indochina) Fine Arts College was established in 1925 and French teachers at the school encouraged students to use silk and lacquer. Then famous silk painters like Tran Van Can, To Ngoc Van, Nguyen Van Que, and Luong Xuan Nhi started to emerge. It was Nguyen Phan Chanh, however, whose works set standards in the field as they’re simple, truthful and humanistic in content.

Painter Nguyen Xuan Tiep said silk paintings in Vietnam started to fade in the 1990s, when they only accounted for 5 percent of items at the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum.

Tiep said silk painting needs time and talent, so many recent artists stop at making a silk painting that “looks good” while the consumption of time reduces the artist’s inspiration.

Meanwhile, government agencies such as the Department of Fine Arts, Photography and Exhibition, and the Department of Cultural Heritage under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, or Vietnam Fine Arts Association didn’t make specific strategies to develop the art, he said. The artists also blamed higher prices of oil and lacquer paintings for the fading art.
Not everyone is pessimistic, though. Nguyen Yen Nguyet, who graduated in lacquer painting at the Hanoi Fine Arts University in 1993 but later grew interested in silk painting, feels that the differences between silk painting and other art forms are precisely what will help it prevail.

“I never made a silk painting, wondering if I could sell it or not. I just paint because I like it,” Nguyet said.

Yen Nguyet 3 by Nguyen Yen Nguyet

Silk painting needs a layer of glue behind, said Nguyet, adding she spent more than ten years grinding rice and keeping the powder in water to make good glue, so that the silk will never get musty.

“Silk painting has the deepness of colors. It doesn’t use many, but the levels of color are diversified as the silk is cleaned with water many times during the painting and only the quintessence of the colors remains,” she said.

“Thus, the more you look at a (fine) silk painting, the more you’re absorbed. That’s the interesting thing about silk paintings. So I don’t believe that there’s a day they’ll all disappear.”

Source: thanhniennews

Dó paper on Vietnamese Fine Arts

Dó paper is a special kind of paper made from the bark of Dó trees (Rhamnoneuron balance) traditionally produced in many villages in Vietnam. The paper material is soft but really durable. It is estimated that the paper has been 500 years old. When drawing or writing on Dó paper, the drawing lines are not blurred, but contrarily quite sharp. In ancient time, the paper was used for paintings or royal documents. Today, the paper is widely used in painting, writing or valuable decorations. It is play an important role in folk art, Dong Ho painting in particular, because of it is durability.