Abstract

With constantly advancing science and technology, we can now forecast quite precisely the elusive weather ahead. As for a precipitation report, we also take great pains to analyze the clouds. Clouds have been imperceptibly closer and more related to our lives. Clouds’ nature is celestial, carefree, and resilient with no concerns of ups and downs. Their intrinsic beauty is intriguing and fascinating. The motive behind this paper is inspired by cloud's nature as its free-spirit is what I aspire to.

At the crack of dawn in the sky, I ascended mountain stairs. Initially I explored the clouds’ deportment and their formation to validate the theory. Then I reached the summit and stood on the edge of the mountain to immerse myself in the beauty of mountains and rivers. My mind shared the pleasure with my eyes. On returning, the search for the clouds’ images in my mind had inspired me to paint. It is the practiced process of creativity. Moving along, I regularly visited galleries, studied exhibition notes and listened attentively to audio guided tours while scrutinizing contemporary ink painting masters' works and their essence to cultivate my creativity. As I observed their ethereal beauty, the layouts of clouds, adding shading around an object for contrasting purposes, gathering and dispersing of mist and their floating flowing rhythms, I seemed to sit at the feet of these masters. While building on my solid traditional ink painting fundamental skill, I strive to achieve fresh presentation.

The profound mystique of nature lies in its benevolence. It all depends on how an artist captures and perceives its beauty and transforms it into inspiration and converts it into his creative force. Whether artistic works are in a realistic or an abstract style or in between, each possesses its own charisma. It is immaterial to draw a boundary among them. Styles are merely a label for artistic symbols. What one really needs to pay attention to is an artist’s driving force of unceasingly pursuing original creativity in his paintings. Therefore, from the deliberations of images and text to the completion of this work, the subjective and objective positions of clouds had swapped with each other. The layouts of each painting were by no means alike. Each was ingenious. In addition to pursuing the verve of clouds' spacing, natural coloring and shaping in the paintings, the elements of literature, poetry and Zen were infused and their aesthetics were also reflected in the paintings. Moreover, to further enrich the topics, "ink writing" that means calligraphy was adopted throughout the paintings. For the above mentioned reasons, the experiences of seas of clouds in high mountains, the elation of clouds and the beauty of clouds are the expected trends in the paintings.