Soul Painter

National Gallery.

Centennial Artistic Achievement Exhibition.

This art exhibition is sponsored by the Ministry of Culture. The art exhibition has brought together a large number of works of senior masters of Chinese oil painting. The students of Tianmei have long been eyeing them like hungry vultures. The art exhibition opened on the first day, and they rushed in with their drawing boards. In the art gallery, start to copy the works you like.

Wu Guanzhong, Quan Shanshi, Zhu Naizheng...

In front of each master's masterpiece, there are students who are trying to find out the biggest secret between those colors and lines.

Although various albums have described these works with a deep meaning that the artist himself may not understand, but as long as you really face these works, you will find that albums and paintings are fundamentally two different things.

Gao Fan stood in front of an oil painting by an artist named 'Anonymous', unable to move anymore.

Anonymous means that the artist is unknown.

In a more detailed description, it reads, "From the collection of an old house in this city, it should have been painted around 1920. The style of painting has an obvious cubist style, and a large number of lines and color blocks depict a terrible scene of hell." '

Because of this description, this painting was named "The Gate of Hell".

The painting is forty centimeters high and thirty-seven centimeters wide, and it is roughly a square. This is a 'small painting', but when Gao Fan looked at the album before, he thought it should be big.

This illusion implies that the unknown painter has mastered 'space'.

The mysteries of line, space, light, and color are hidden among millions of things. When they fall into the painter's pen, if they can be integrated into one, it is already a masterpiece.

Gao Fan put down the drawing board and began to copy the painting.

To copy this kind of thing in the exhibition hall, the only thing you need is courage, because there will be countless people pointing at your paintings, and soon there will be an old man and a girl standing behind Gao Fan.

The old man is wearing a silk Tang suit, the girl is wearing jeans and a T-shirt, one looks pretentious, and the other is youthful and beautiful.

"Little pheasant, do you think there is something wrong with this painting?" The old man said behind Gao Fan's back.

"What's the problem? Can you tell me?" the girl asked.

"There is a problem with this introduction. It is true that Picasso was painting Cubism in 1920, but the fine brushwork style of the characters in this painting is obviously a forgery of later generations. It is not worth copying at all, and it is a waste of effort."

The old man was obviously talking to Gao Fan.

Gao Fan turned the drawing board slightly to an angle, turned his back to the old man, and began to use a pencil to make a base on his own.

"Why is it fake if it has a meticulous style?" The girl asked curiously.

"Cubism only took shape in France around 1910. Our 1920 was the Beiyang period. There is no record to prove that there were masters who could learn Chinese and Western skills in that era. Feng, if it is really a work of that time, it is impossible to be unknown in history, so it must be a fake work by later generations, and it is not worth copying."

The old man's discussion quickly attracted a group of audiences, and everyone was counting on this old man who obviously possessed extremely high artistic knowledge to speak more.

But seeing the crowd, the old man was unwilling to talk anymore, so he stood behind Gao Fan, staring at Gao Fan to outline the lines, squeeze the paint, color, base, color...

An oil painting takes a long time or a short time to paint, like Da Vinci's "anatomical" painting method, who wrote a thesis for painting a tree, and Van Gogh's passionate creation, painting two hundred in one hundred days There are also multiple ones.

Of course, copying is faster, especially copying Cubism, anyway, it is just line structure and color blocks, just paint on it.

While watching Gao Fan's fast painting, the old man frowned tightly, and was about to speak, but was pulled away by the girl next to him.

From the corner of his eye, Gao Fan caught sight of the two obstructive people behind and finally left, he didn't care, and continued to draw.

About an hour later, the outline of the painting in front of Gao Fan has been seen, and there are a few people around him, but all the onlookers can look at the painting that Gao Fan is working on, and then look at the "Gate of Hell" copied by him , all showing puzzled looks.

Because it's completely different.

The painting "The Gates of Hell" is a scene similar to an abyss. Under the dark red sky, there is a smooth ochre-blue cliff. There are dozens of smaller human beings, climbing on the smooth cliff, but clearly Nowhere to focus, he was looking up and calling for help, and further down, there was an even darker abyss...

The visual impact of this painting is very strong. Standing in front of this painting, the viewer will soon feel a terrifying and desolate emotional wave. The more they try to distinguish the desperate situation faced by those people on the cliff of the abyss, the more You will feel chills down your spine, and more than one person hugged his shoulders and shivered and said 'it's a bit scary' after observing carefully for a few minutes.

Being able to convey emotions and make viewers empathize is the standard for a masterpiece of art, so the old man said that such a painter cannot be unknown.

However, Gao Fan's painting is a human face made of color blocks. This face is crying out in despair, the neck is distorted to an exaggerated degree, and the despair and panic in the eyes are the same as the artistic conception conveyed by the gate of hell... But it's just different.

"Uh... kind of disgusting."

A middle-aged woman watched "The Gates of Hell" for a few minutes, and Gao Fan's copying for a few minutes, and then she shuddered and made such a criticism.

But Gao Fan was satisfied to see that in front of him, a number that only he could see jumped from '78/100' to '79/100'.

Gao Fan noticed this number three months ago.

At that time, the semester had just started, and once he had a high fever, a number appeared in front of his eyes after the high fever. At that time, the number was '0/100'.

After repeatedly judging that he was not mentally ill with the help of medical methods and psychological tests, Gao Fan discovered that he could increase this number by reducing the rationality of the people around him.

The so-called rational value is Sanity, which Gao Fan abbreviates as SAN value.

Gao Fan obtained the first SAN value through a static sketch called "Boiled Banana" (don't search for it).

Then he harvested the second batch of SAN values ​​​​through "Dual Disc Fluke" (don't search).

"The Nest's Mouth of the Colorful Munia" (please cherish your sanity) made his SAN value break through 40.

Before his fourth novel "Exploding Cockroach" was born, it was almost wiped out by his classmates in the same studio.

For this reason, Gao Fan had to give up this shortcut, and began to obtain the SAN value by comparing normal works.

For example, the "Gate of Hell" in front of me, Gao Fan was keenly aware that it had the potential to make people lose SAN value at the first glance from the gallery album. This is a... um, crazy work , the desperation rendered in it can be seen everywhere.

But it's not that the SAN value lowered by Gao Fan himself will not be collected, so he is standing here holding the drawing board at this moment, believing that when his copying plan is completed, it will be his harvest season.

"Not like."

"Not at all."

"I don't even know what I'm drawing."

...

The comments from the onlookers couldn't disturb Gao Fan's heart, but soon a sense of oppression reappeared behind his back. Gao Fan turned his head and saw the old man with furrowed eyebrows and his beautiful granddaughter again.

"The face you painted is so...desperate." The girl looked at Gao Fan's almost finished work, and felt that this despair had 'polluted' her happy mood.

SAN+1, 80/100.

Gao Fan looked at the old man again, expecting the old man to contribute another SAN value to him.

But the old man looked at Gao Fan's works, and then at the "Gate of Hell", and suddenly said, "Is this a person on the cliff in this painting you copied?"

"Old man, you have really good eyesight." Gao Fan praised.