Almighty painter

Chapter 687: Will Destiny Sell Indulgences? (Part )

When Chen Shenglin just walked into the studio, he had an indescribable strange feeling.

His keen sense of emotion allows him to sense anger.

It was not his anger, but the anger of the bald man behind him.

His anger at the painting.

This anger made Chen Shenglin unusually confused, because he didn't know where this anger came from, because... when Chen Shenglin first saw the works on the easel, he did not feel similar emotions in his heart.

So weird.

Is there something that Baldy can read at a glance from the picture, but Chen Shenglin can't read it?
Chen Shenglin's confusion was like when the imperial court sent an imperial edict, and the heroes were meeting in the gathering hall of Liangshanpo to discuss it. Song Jiang, the emergency rain, and Wu Yong, the wise military advisor, were staring at the difficult words "by the will of Heaven and so on" on the edict and struggling to recite them in their minds. Suddenly, a hero jumped out and slammed the table.

"Asshole! From what I read, it's clear that the content here has bad intentions and is scolding our brothers!"

It would be fine if the person who jumped out was Lin Chong or Wu Song, but even if it was the rough but meticulous Lu Zhishen, everyone could accept it with a little gritting their teeth.

after all.

At the end of his life, Monk Hua was able to recite a Buddhist verse, "The tide is coming in the Qiantang River, and today I know who I am." He was a remarkable person who had "an instant of enlightenment and insight into his nature."

But if everyone looks back, they will find that the person who said this is someone like Black Whirlwind Li Kui or Dwarf Tiger Wang Ying.

Then as a person you will be confused.

Do you understand that... You know the characters, but do the characters know you?
"Do you understand?"

This is what Chen Shenglin really wanted to ask his younger brother.

Everyone is a book.

Some books are thin, some are thick.

The bald guy is the kind of person who may not be able to form the complete 26 English letters by turning the pages of a book.

Chen Shenglin knows his subordinates too well.

The other party's artistic aesthetic ability, at most, remains at the level of viewing Rococo oil paintings as pornographic paintings.

The bald guy is the hyena that Brother Hao released to bite people.

The value of a hyena lies in the ferocity of its teeth, not in the thinking of its brain.

and so.

It is quite difficult to make a bald man like a piece of art that is not an erotic painting, and it is also not easy to anger a bald man...

Baldy is different from Lao Yang.

Lao Yang is Cao Xuan's assistant. He may be a bit crude, but he is an outstanding graduate of CAFA after all, and a cultured person who can recite the entire works of Keats by heart.

Anyone who wants to deceive him with his work doesn't know how many eyes Lord Ma has.

As soon as you stick your butt out there, Brother Yang will know what kind of shit you are going to take.

If Mr. Cao hadn't pushed him back, the moment Cui Xiaoming posted the painting on social media, Old Yang would have smelled the scent, and would have rushed over barking and baring his teeth and grabbed the food from Cui Xiaoming's family's butts.

But the soil on the bald head is truly unmodified, purely natural, the soil that comes from the bones.

In his whole life, he is really a gangster who only knows how to fight and kill.

Who do you let him bite? You must tell him clearly and explicitly.

to be honest.

Unless someone writes simple and clear words like "son of a bitch" directly on the canvas with a brush, and wants to do some complex conceptual art or in-depth modeling with content to curse him, the bald guy probably has no idea what you are painting.

His artistic level and cultural accomplishment allow him to only have a superficial and superficial understanding of the works.

Brother Hao can always see through his thoughts and ideas at a glance.

This is also one of the reasons why he has many cultural figures like Wu Qinlai under his command, but he has always treated Baldy as his trusted subordinate over the years.

No need to look back.

Chen Shenglin sensed the bald man's anger and also his fear.

The bald man’s fear is the fear of the words “you are about to die”, but where does his anger come from?
Chen Shenglin couldn't understand the source of this emotion. The first moment he entered the studio, he felt that this painting was not what he expected. His smile faded and his emotions were involuntarily drawn away.

But Chen Shenglin did not initially feel that Gu Weijing's works were so outrageous that they needed to be criticized as "outrageous".

Impressionism is not a painting genre like modern art or avant-garde art, which requires viewers to read several large volumes and study various art theories before they can understand it.

But it is not the type of fairy tale illustration that has no threshold and can be understood by an old woman.

It still requires a person to look with heart, interpret with heart, and feel with heart. This is not the threshold of painting, but the threshold of feeling beauty.

For a moment, Chen Shenglin wanted to turn around and call the bald man over to ask him what he had realized from this painting.

But he still held back.

This dark-toned Impressionist work seemed to have a magical power that attracted his attention and left him no time to think about anything else.

This painting made Chen Shenglin feel alert and uneasy almost instinctively.

Some people say that the best paintings in the world give you a sense of familiarity the moment you see them.

It makes you feel like it's "your" painting.

It is a painting that you have spent your whole life wanting to paint but could never finish. The anger in the painting is your anger, and the sadness in the painting is also your sadness. (Note)
And now.

This painting gave Chen Shenglin such a feeling.

No.

A more accurate description.

What is on the easel is not Chen Shenglin’s unfinished painting, but the dream that Hao Ge wants to have but cannot finish every night.

When he walked into the studio...

A dreamlike thick fog suddenly came towards me from the drawing paper.

Chen Shenglin seemed to know that this was not a beautiful dream, so he instinctively felt uneasy and unhappy, but the scene was still like an endless dream, attracting him to fall, and fall continuously.

Impressionist painters were very good at using the principle of complementary colors.

They would use golden sunlight to match the violet shadows, and darker orange-red maple leaves to match the green shrubs in the background.

This color combination will have a certain degree of deceptive effect on the human eye.

Colors are superimposed on each other, light and dark areas appear repeatedly, and between the interweaving of light and shadow, it will seem to the audience that the entire picture is vibrating.

A painter can use such short brushstrokes in a static landscape oil painting to create the swaying effect of "the mountain wind blowing, the rustling of leaves in the forest", or to paint the dynamic effect of "the moon is bright in the middle of the night, and the rain hits the banana leaves".

The psychological suggestion caused by this visual dislocation is the greatest pleasure in the creation process of an Impressionist oil painting.

The brushstrokes are like the painter’s poems, telling each person’s unique story.

In this oil painting, the cold shadows and the scattered warm brushstrokes behind the shadows combine together to produce an indescribable chemical reaction.

They are also telling their own stories in front of Chen Shenglin.

When Gu Weijing was painting, he should have added some gray tones to the lines to make them look particularly dynamic and glowing.

Different colors create different spaces that interact with each other.

These color spaces are combined to form light spots scattered all over the canvas.

As eerie red as flame.

The same blue as lisianthus flowers.

There are also transparent white lines pulling the picture, like flowing moonlight in the darkness, or entangled and vibrating spider silk, entangling his fate.

The audience feels the vibration of life on those thin lines.

Chen Shenglin's gaze was fixed on these spider silks.

He is a person who likes reading.

He used to not believe in fate or God, but when he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, he began to read many books about the imagination of the world after death.

Somehow.

He suddenly remembered the words in Ryunosuke Akutagawa's novel "Hell Transformation".

……

"The last bit of spider silk that I could grab onto suddenly snapped."

"Gandha was doomed before he could even shout. Like a spinning top, he was falling rapidly into the dark, boundless depths of hell."

"And the last spider thread from the distant paradise hung shortly above his head, hanging in the starless sky, emitting a faint glow."

——Japanese: Ryunosuke Akutagawa.

……

The moment he thought of these words in his heart.

"Bang".

The spider-silk-like bright lines on the screen seemed to be broken in an instant by the vibration and resonance of the soul.

Chen Shenglin also fell to the bottom of the black fog.

The scattered fragments of color in the black fog gradually revealed their complete appearance.

Red is a burning flame.

Blue is a cold light.

Wild winds, icy rain, heavy stones, and endless mud poured down from the endless heights at the same time. Withered trees, half-human, half-demon goats, blazing spears, and bells on temples swayed in the flames, roaring, shouting, and wailing...

The lines on the screen shrouded in black fog change into various shapes.

And those parts of the picture illuminated by the light, the old men, children, couples and farmers in the frames on the background wall, are all staring at the man sitting on the chair.

There was no hatred or anger in their eyes.

Just watch.

A cold gaze.

Perhaps simply looking at him is enough to make people feel a heavy pressure. The man on the chair has half of his soul torn by the deep darkness, while the other half of his body is pierced by a look that leaves no escape.

This is truly an extremely painful work.

The colors of the oil painting are like burning flames.

There was no scolding or whipping, but you could feel the pain of the flames burning your body without any contact.

This fire is generated by one's senses, like lightning striking the air and igniting trees several meters away.

It burns in a person's heart, roasting him from the inside out.

Anger entangles anger. Sorrow weaves sorrow.

Pain shrouds pain.

……

All of this comes together, and finally -

Despair breeds despair.

At this moment, Chen Shenglin finally saw the face of the man sitting on the chair. His face was filled with pain as he was judged by light and torn apart by darkness.

His body slumped in the chair like an animal being used for sacrifice, as if he had given up all resistance.

This kind of body posture makes the audience feel that this is no longer a living, breathing person.

That was a dead person.

This reminded Chen Shenglin of the famous painting "Ophelia".

It is as famous as "The Death of Marat" and is one of the most famous paintings about death in the history of world art. The story is based on Shakespeare's play "Hamlet".

Ophelia is the daughter of the minister who plotted to murder the old king, and is also the girl that Prince Hamlet likes.

Hamlet stabbed the King's Chamberlain to death in revenge.

After Ophelia learned about this, she fell seriously ill and wandered around singing strange songs all day long. Finally, after a painful struggle, she jumped into the water and chose to die.

According to Shakespeare's original description - "Ophelia's body was stretched and calm, her clothes spread out, making her temporarily float on the water like a mermaid. She drifted with the waves, singing ancient songs intermittently, as if she didn't feel the danger of the situation at all, and as if she had grown up in the water."

"Ophelia", a work by John Everett Millais, a representative painter of the Pre-Raphaelite School, was based on this work.

Chen Shenglin had seen the original painting in the Tyler Gallery in the UK.

The man lying on the chair in front of me has a posture that is exactly the same as Ophelia's. Ophelia lies powerlessly in the river, her whole body supported by the stream, while the man in the painting lies powerlessly on the chair, his whole body supported by the chair.

But his expression was nothing like the flatness, dignity, calmness and detachment in the painting by painter John Everett Millais, where Ophelia hums in the stream and greets death calmly.

In Chen Shenglin's heart.

Man is not welcoming death or walking towards death, but being caught by death.

His face was completely twisted into a ball, his brows furrowed.

The blood vessels on his forehead were twisted and the veins were throbbing; he died at that moment, and the painter froze the moment of death, with the panic and fear remaining between his facial muscles - the fear was gloomy and deep, like a maggot crawling under the skin, gnawing at a person's face and also at a person's heart.

And that person's face was his face.

Chen Shenglin's face.

Chen Shenglin didn't know what the bald man saw in this painting, but he understood in an instant why his smile disappeared and he no longer liked it the moment he stepped into the studio.

He also understands.

Why does the temperament, which is like an oil painting of a dream that he wants to dream but can never finish, bring Chen Shenglin such a strong sense of uneasiness deep in his intuition?

Because this was not the dream he wanted to dream but could not complete.

It was a dream that he wanted to wake up from but couldn't.

His body was awake. Standing in the studio, in front of the easel, he could feel the hardness of the floor and the softness of the high-count fabric of his clothes.

He could feel the wind blowing the gauze curtains through the open window and blowing on his face.

His mind was immersed in the picture, torn, gnawed and entangled by those gazes, those black mists and lines.

His soul seemed to be pulled out and mistakenly merged into the body of the "dead self" in the painting, and he felt the unstoppable and inescapable surging fear in the moment before his death.

Can't move.

Can't wake up.

Like being possessed by an evil spirit.

"Wow!"

Chen Shenglin finally managed to break free from the gloomy atmosphere of the picture. His face was pale, and he staggered back two steps, almost overturning the table beside him before he could barely stand.

"Go away!"

He angrily pushed away the bald man who ran over to support him, shook his arms, and gasped for breath.

For an instant.

The overwhelming anger on Chen Shenglin's face made the bald man feel as if he was being coldly stared at by an evil ghost when he pushed him away.

The chill made him shiver.

this moment.

The bald man felt that Chen Shenglin had more in mind than just killing the two young men in the studio.

He even wanted to kill himself.

He was furious enough to want to set the world on fire.

I don’t know how many years it has been.

The bald man had never seen Boss Chen so angry and so scary.

But, in the end.

Chen Shenglin did nothing. He just held on to the table, his chest heaving, and took deep breaths.

He looked at the sunlight coming in through the window. He wanted to walk to the window, open it completely, and breathe in the wind coming from the endless lavender fields outside. In the moist and warm air in the early morning in Yangon, he wanted to drive away the throbbing and coldness that the painting had left in his heart.

The throbbing and coldness left by death.

But the moment he took a step, he felt that the sunlight outside the window was too bright and too dazzling, which hurt his eyes and made him want to cry.

then.

Chen Shenglin stopped again.

He just stayed at the boundary between sunlight and darkness, like the man in the painting, his hair at the temples stuck tightly to his forehead and extended into the shadow, while the skin on the side of his cheek illuminated by the sunlight was so pale and bloodless that it was almost transparent.

He pursed his lips into a straight line, but the corners of his mouth were trembling slightly uncontrollably.

The bald man was stunned again.

I don’t know how many years it has been.

He had never seen Chen Shenglin so fragile and frightened.

The posture of the characters in the painting looks like "The Godfather" on the wall, and the color temperament of the whole painting is similar to Ms. Carroll's "Old Church in a Thunderstorm".

But at this moment.

Chen Shenglin then realized that the feeling given by this painting was more like another work he had seen not long ago.

The mural on the wall of the temple, Cao Xuan's last work, "Worshiping Buddha and Protecting the Dharma".

The two are one east and one west.

A detailed and colorful painting.

A Western impression.

In the painting “Worshiping Buddha and Protecting the Dharma” there is a Buddha and Bodhisattva sitting on a lotus platform, surrounded by the guardian heavenly kings, the solemn Vajra in armor, the celestial maidens in long fluttering skirts, Vajra Secret Trace and the Rouge General, as well as all living beings in the human world, including boys, old men and monks.

It depicts the story of Buddhism and the human world.

In the painting “Human Noise”, the artist is sitting on a chair in the front of the picture. The portraits around him also include children, young people and old people. In the dark flowing shadows, there are all kinds of scenes in the underworld.

Demons and monsters.

Little devil, the king of hell.

Infinite hell.

It depicts the other half that is not depicted in "Pray to Buddha and Protect the Dharma", which depicts the story of the human world and the underworld.

This is a painting of "Hell Transformations".
-
"I actually drew a picture like this..."

Brother Hao is worthy of being a godfather-like figure in the underworld. He went from being born with nothing to becoming a wealthy man, becoming the owner of this manor worth $200 million. He accumulated wealth that ordinary people could not accomplish in several lifetimes, and it only took him forty years.

On the phone, he told Gu Weijing in the tone of educating a junior that if a man wanted to be a real man, he must have a tenacious, indestructible and unbeatable character.

A person who just cries when encountering problems or setbacks.

He might be able to draw very good and delicate pictures.

However, unless you are really lucky, it is difficult to really reach the top of your career.

A man who is as fragile as glass crystal is not a real man. Crystal is only suitable to be placed on a desk and looked at and played with. It will break if it rolls in the wind and rain.

A person who was born as a forger and could get to such a point where he could be involved in both the black and white worlds and had connections with everyone, he must not be a good person.

For a person who was born as a forger to be able to get to such a point where he could be connected to both the black and white worlds and have connections everywhere, he must have an extremely stubborn character.

Don't give up, and don't believe in fate.

This painting "Human Noise" was like a heavy hammer of divine punishment, smashing into Chen Shenglin's chest. For a moment, even his trusted subordinates beside him couldn't help but wonder if Brother Hao was about to collapse.

But his loss of composure only lasted for a very short moment.

Anger, rage, fear, and fragility appeared on his face one after another and then quickly disappeared.

After taking a few deep breaths, the middle-aged man's expression returned to calm.

This painting, these emotions, did not succeed in knocking him down.

He was driven to the edge of the octagonal cage and received a fierce "left hook" from fate, but he still stood there even more fiercely.

If it weren't for the fact that the voice seemed particularly hoarse.

Suddenly.

You will feel that he has turned back into the majestic and unfathomable godfather of Xihe Hall.

"The painting is very good, really good, from an artistic point of view, it really is so." Chen Shenglin paused slightly, "I admire it very much."

"This religious sense of judgment is also very cleverly drawn, as if fate is grabbing you with a strong and powerful hand, making it impossible for you to escape. You know what I want, and I also know what you want to express. But - Gu Weijing, I have a question for you."

"If I'm not mistaken, unlike Mr. Cao, you don't believe in Buddhism, gods, ghosts, or Bodhisattvas, right?"

Chen Shenglin looked around, his eyes passed over the easel in front of him, and finally fell on the young man's face.

"Why did you paint such a picture here? Is it here, at the point of desperation, that you want to resort to metaphysics and judge me by fate?"

"But if fate is really useful, if Buddha and Bodhisattva really exist, and if a person has the power to choose his own destiny, then why are you still standing here? I know you always think you are a good person and I am a bad person."

"Since good and evil are reincarnated and karma is repaid, why isn't there a white light descending from the sky to take you away right now?"

"Mr. Gu, don't you think there is a big philosophical loophole here?"

(End of this chapter)