It is a pity that Zhang Daqian cannot carry out such practice in his own art. He has been famous for many years, and his iconic painting style has become a trademark recognized by the market. Zhang Daqian, who has a large family to support, cannot change easily. Perhaps out of a transference of wishes, he hoped that Fang Zhaolu could fulfill this unfinished artistic wish.
With the teacher's encouragement and his own past thinking, Fang Zhaolu began this art path of clumsiness and survival. She completely abandoned the techniques of the Lingnan School, and started a new style of painting with the simple brushwork of Han Li and the wild spirit of freehand brushwork. When Fang Zhaolin accompanied Zhang Daqian to see art exhibitions in the United States, he was also influenced by the Western abstract art master Pollock, and added Pollock's abstract spirit to the freehand landscape. Freehand brushwork is a Chinese abstract method, and Pollock is a Western abstract thinking, which has been integrated and unified in Fang Zhaolu's work. Coupled with Fang Zhaolu's own natural childlike aesthetic mentality, he transformed the characters on the Han bricks, giving Fang's landscape paintings more natural interest.
One early morning, Fang Zhaolu created a landscape in Keju Studio. After Zhang Daqian saw it, he excitedly wrote a couplet: Two and three stars fell in front of their chests, and the soles of their feet were green on the hundreds of thousands of peaks.
This is the state that Zhang Daqian hoped that Fang Zhaolu could reach, and Fang Zhaolu also worked hard and successfully reached it. With her talent and perseverance, she blazed the path pointed out by her teacher. Just like the road to the sky that often appears in her paintings, she has carved out her own path in the mountains of art, and she is always climbing diligently on this road. Fang Zhaolu was a person who respected her teacher very much. After she became famous for many years, she returned to Wuxi and still respectfully went to her teacher's home to pay her respects. At Zhao Shao'ang's funeral, she knelt down and kowtowed with a trembling eighty-year-old body. He treated Zhang Daqian as a teacher and a father. Not only did he help Zhang Daqian for a long time in Hong Kong, but he also always called him "Teacher Zhang", and he was very respected. Even Zhang Daqian's later splash-color style was inspired by Fang Zhaolu in the United States. When counting Fang Zhaolu's works, one of the strange things is that one year before Zhang Daqian began to create the splash-color style, Fang Zhaolu once painted a splash-color work. This work is mainly made of azurite, lime green and ink, and is painted over a large area to form the shape of a mountain. But there was only one such splash of color, and it never appeared again. Why would Fang Zhaolu give up such a newly created painting style? The reason is that Zhang Daqian liked this work very much after seeing it and thought that he could also explore in this direction. Just like Zhang Daqian stopped painting tigers for Zhang Shanzi, from then on Fang Zhaolu no longer touched paint, but left this world to his teacher to create, and believed that the teacher could do better than him. This shows that Fang Zhaolu Zhao Lu's respect and affection for Zhang Daqian.
Not only in art, Fang Zhaolu always defended Zhang Daqian in the face of doubts from others. Hong Kong collector Li Dian once recalled that Fang Zhaolu also liked Qi Baishi very much and absorbed many of Qi Baishi's artistic styles in his paintings. So in a chat, another collector asked, comparing the artistic level of Zhang Daqian and Qi Baishi, who do you think is better? Fang Zhaolu immediately stopped the topic and said, "Don't go on. I know what you mean. Qi Baishi is a master, but Teacher Zhang is my teacher. I can't make this comparison. Don't go on." Zhang Daqian died of illness in Taiwan. Later, Fang Zhaolu was included in Taiwan's blacklist because his political stance was closer to the Chinese Communist Party, and therefore he could not go to Taiwan for the funeral. Fang Zhaolu was in extreme pain. He set up a mourning hall at home to pay homage to his teacher and shed tears for several days.
Zhang Daqian's family also likes Fang Zhaolu very much. Zhang Daqian's youngest son Paul calls her "Sister Fang." Zhang Daqian often says that he must learn from your sister Fang. She works very hard. Indeed, during the year that he could live there, Fang Zhaolu often painted day and night. He felt that Teacher Zhang's house was full of guests every day, which wasted time for painting, and he even advised the teacher to reduce his social activities. As for Xu Wenbo and Fang Zhaolu, they may be of the same age, but they are less like a master and more like sisters. Many years later, when Fang Zhaolu recalled it, he would happily say that Mrs. Xu especially liked the Wuxi wontons I made!
After decades, like a white horse passing by, Fang Zhaolu also passed away. However, from various historical facts, we can feel that this disciple of Dafeng Hall, whose paintings are least like Zhang Daqian, is one of Zhang Daqian's most admired and devoted disciples. He taught her to learn ancient paintings and taught her to create " The realm of "clumsy and alive" taught her to learn to find and persist in herself. Their artistic works seem to have very different styles, but their artistic spirits have the most idealistic intersection.