Autumn Heron

Lin Fengmian is a modern Chinese painting artist and an outstanding art educator. He was the earliest advocator and a main representative of "fusion of Chinese and Western art styles" in early twentieth century.

Lin Fengmian’s exploration of Chinese and western integration is reflected in every aspect. First, as of the size and composition of his works, they are quite different from traditional Chinese painting. His works mostly adopt square shaped composition, which is more suitable for modern living room space, and now has been widely accepted in Chinese paintings. However, during the times of Lin Fengmian, such square shaped composition was quite new and fresh in China. This painting Autumn Heron just adopts such style. Lin Fengmian’s most prominent achievement is that the "fusion of Chinese and Western styles" he advocated is not only simple superposition of the two kinds of culture art techniques, but to find the common "lyric feature" of ancient Chinese painting and western modern painting, and combine their visual experience so as to create a new look. Autumn Heron is not Lin Fengmian's most iconic series of color painting, however, even it is pure black, white and grey in color, it can still present highly generalized and almost abstract images of heron and reed and then convey the artist’s strong emotions in the heart, thus properly create a lonely and miserable mental atmosphere.