Due to the differences in national characteristics, geographical environment and historical and humanistic background of Chinese and Western arts, Chinese and Western artistic creation concepts are different. A correct understanding of the differences between Chinese and western artistic concepts is conducive to improving people's cultural literacy and aesthetic level, thus rationally treating the differences between Chinese and western art, correcting the contempt for traditional art or the rejection of western art, and guiding art to develop in the right direction of eclecticism.
There are various types of western art, and we only discuss the general concept of western art with western paintings. Generally speaking, western artistic concepts have two remarkable characteristics:
First, the theme is to conquer nature and put people first. Western painting is influenced by western traditional philosophy. Western philosophy thinks that people can conquer nature and then transform it, so they pay attention to following and using the laws of nature. By the Renaissance in the15th century, under the guidance of humanism, painting was more people-oriented.
Western paintings mainly focus on figure painting, which describes secular life, while the description of figures focuses on the magnificent body and heroic spirit of men, outlines the elegance and health of women, and expresses the desire for human liberation and freedom, as well as the yearning for a better life in the future.
The performance of western landscape painting strictly follows the principle of expressing nature objectively and truly, and at the same time, it uses natural science knowledge such as optics and geometry to achieve the effect of imitating, reproducing and copying nature. It can be seen that the general idea of western art is to learn from nature, overcome nature, shape artistic ideas and take people as the core.
Second, pay attention to realism and cite technology. Western painting techniques pay attention to realism. Taking figure painting as an example, if western painters want to create figure painting, they must have a standard model as the object, and at the same time, they must understand optics, chromatics, geometry and other related knowledge. In order to understand the structure of human body, they must learn and practice the knowledge of human anatomy in person.
In the process of painting creation, focus perspective is constructed through perspective technology, so that the picture you can reach has a sense of hierarchy and realism, and the proportion of things in the picture is appropriate; In composition, geometric principles are used to create a three-dimensional picture and a sense of dynamic and static pictures;
In terms of color, we should pay attention to using the knowledge of chromatics and optics to shape the figure form through the contrast between light and dark, and render the color tone of the picture while reflecting the real and objective objects with reasonable color collocation. It can be said that western artistic concepts are permeated with scientific consciousness and realistic rational spirit everywhere.