Serene Mountain

作品賞析

Nantou is artist Lin Chih-Yu’s hometown, serving as the base for his life and creative work, where he draws inspiration and develops his artistic vision. From this small mountain town surrounded by mountains, he found inspiration and created a series of oil paintings focusing mainly on mountain forest scenery. In this piece, Serene Mountain, he uses a collage technique in its composition, which references the nineteenth-century Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin’s masterpiece, Isle of the Dead, but transformed into the landscape of Nantou’s high mountains and deep valleys. In terms of brushstrokes, he uses dotting and glazing of oil pigments to depict beautiful green mountains. Most ingeniously, Lin Chih-Yu painted a church that seems to be isolated from the world in the middle of the valley. By contrasting the magnificence of nature with the smallness of man-made buildings, people can feel the artistic conception of the human world contained in a grain of sand. The captured effect of light and shadow in the painting also makes this piece exude a mysterious, dreamlike atmosphere.