20 17 root carving master recruitment

If there is really a hand in this world that can turn stones into gold and rotten wood into silver, it must be an artist's hand. An ordinary stone, an ordinary wood, through the artist's hand, can become a fascinating work of art, and its value has increased by thousands of times. Root carving art is one of the most common folk carving works, and it is also a plastic art that discovers natural beauty and shows it in creative processing.

Root carving is different from ordinary stone carving and wood carving. The requirement of root carving is: "three points artificial, seven points natural". What does this mean? In other words, the master of root carving should fully consider the natural form of root wood when creating root carving, and then carry out artificial artistic processing. For example, a long vine is naturally carved into a snake or a dragon, not a mouse.

1982 root carving works of the Warring States period unearthed from No.1 Chu Tomb in Mashan, Jiangling, Hubei Province. This work is a tomb animal with a tiger head and a dragon body, and its four feet are carved with snakes, finches, frogs, cicadas and other patterns. Although the shape is very strange, it shows that China has reached the level of ingenious combination of natural form and artificial carving more than 2,300 years ago.

After the Sui Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty, the art of root carving was not only seen by the people, but also favored by the royal family and nobles. It is recorded in the Biography of Li Mi in the New Tang Dynasty: "Those who taste pine branches and hide their backs are called nourishing harmony, and then they are dragon-shaped, because Xian Di strives for success in all directions."

This sentence tells the story of Li Bi, an official of Ye, who dedicated the shape of Jackie Chan to the emperor with natural roots. The emperor liked it very much, and later more and more people followed suit. By the Ming and Qing dynasties, the art of root carving was mature and the materials were more extensive. Some carpenters use not only roots, but also whole trees to carve.

In the late 1970s, there were more and more artists engaged in the art of root carving in China. Master Long of Panwu Village in Guangxi is a very famous local root carving artist. He is a pioneer. He organized more than a dozen root carving masters and spent six months carving an oriental lion with a length of15m, a width of 2.5m and a height of 5m. This giant lion in the East is carved from the finest golden nanmu, weighing 30 tons. Not to mention the manual cost, the material cost and the whole production process alone cost more than 2 million yuan.

This huge lion attracted the attention of all walks of life as soon as it was exhibited. One of the wealthy businessmen felt very imposing and offered 3 million yuan to buy it, but Master Long explicitly refused. There is a simple reason. After 3 million yuan is thrown away from the cost of materials and labor, there is nothing left, at least 6.5438+million yuan.

The rich businessman heard that Master Long was asking for 6.5438+million yuan and left without looking back. Moreover, after the news that Master Long sold the root carving for 10 million yuan came out, no one actually said that he would buy this giant root carving. More than three years have passed, no one cares, and Master Long has no intention of reducing the price at all.

In fact, the artistic value of root carving lies not in its size, but in its exquisiteness. Even a root carving about the size of a lion's fingernail can still be valuable as long as it is beautifully carved. It took Master Long only six months to make the root carving of15m, which was naturally too hasty. In addition, Master Long spent too much money and refused to reduce the price, so in the end, this "Oriental Lion" has never been sold.