Day 81 - "Fantastic" landscape
August 27, 2018
The theme of Gallery 215 is the "fantastic landscape." During the 17th century, a period coinciding with the transfer of power from the Ming to the Qing dynasty, artists grew less concerned with verisimilitude in painting and, according to the caption, relied more on their imaginations in depicting strangely bulbous mountains and other unusual landscape forms.
This small gallery features eight sheets from an album of paintings and elegiac poems by the painter Gong Xian. Unfortunately, I had to photograph today's object, one of these paintings, at an angle to avoid distracting reflections in the glass. The painting measures perhaps 16 inches high and 24 inches across and at first strikes me as quite realistic. It shows a thatched cottage nestled in a grove of trees with denuded branches. Behind it, a stream flows down a rocky slope, creating several waterfalls, and then widening into a rock-strewn basin at the bottom. All this is fairly clear. What I can't readily fathom is the background in which this scene is set. Does the white area against which the jagged branches of the trees appear represent sky or a large body of water? If the latter, do the darker areas on both sides represent river banks or something else? What about the white area at the right of the image?
At first the painting appears peaceful and tranquil, but the more I look at it, the more I find its ambiguity unsettling. It makes me feel dislocated, lost in space. Does my sense of disturbance arise from the painter's intentions, I wonder, or from my own lack of familiarity with this mode of depiction?
This small gallery features eight sheets from an album of paintings and elegiac poems by the painter Gong Xian. Unfortunately, I had to photograph today's object, one of these paintings, at an angle to avoid distracting reflections in the glass. The painting measures perhaps 16 inches high and 24 inches across and at first strikes me as quite realistic. It shows a thatched cottage nestled in a grove of trees with denuded branches. Behind it, a stream flows down a rocky slope, creating several waterfalls, and then widening into a rock-strewn basin at the bottom. All this is fairly clear. What I can't readily fathom is the background in which this scene is set. Does the white area against which the jagged branches of the trees appear represent sky or a large body of water? If the latter, do the darker areas on both sides represent river banks or something else? What about the white area at the right of the image?
At first the painting appears peaceful and tranquil, but the more I look at it, the more I find its ambiguity unsettling. It makes me feel dislocated, lost in space. Does my sense of disturbance arise from the painter's intentions, I wonder, or from my own lack of familiarity with this mode of depiction?
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