Chinese folk paper cutting with female red and embroidery pattern base
The criterion for people to evaluate a womans ability, dexterity or lack of dexterity is how good her craftsmanship is. When rural girls get married, they have to make purses, insoles, and tobacco pouches to give to the mans partner to show their dexterity. It is a traditional custom to use female red to show off ones skills to others. Meng Yuanlao of the Song Dynasty has a similar record in "Tokyo Menghua Lu"; on the day after the wedding, the new daughter-in-law "pays homage to her elders and relatives, and makes shoe pillows with colored pieces of each as a gift" , which is called congratulations." One of the criteria for rural men to choose a spouse and start a family is that the woman must be clever and skillful, so that such a woman can be diligent and thrifty, run a good home, and be a good assistant to her husband. As the folk saying goes: "If you don't grow good crops, it will take you a season, but if you don't get a good wife, you will last a lifetime." In order to find a good husband, women attach great importance to the cultivation and improvement of their own conditions. Under the influence of their grandmothers, mothers or neighbors, they have learned how to practice the art of knives since they were young, and strive to become skillful hands. Among the female needlework, embroidery is the most expressive of womens exquisiteness and energy. In order to create a pleasant and good environment for living and working, clothing, clothing and bedding must be decorated and beautified with embroidery. If you want to embroider a pattern well, you must first have a good pattern. The pattern must not only be beautiful, but also meet the requirements of the embroidery process. The outline of each image in the pattern must be clear and not connected to each other. Just as the women themselves said: "It must be clear and clear." The petals, branches and leaves of flowers, the heads, tails and upper limbs of birds and animals, as well as the movements and facial features of characters must be clearly distinguished. Otherwise, it will be inconvenient to arrange and use embroidery stitches, affect the color separation of embroidery threads, and is not conducive to the interpretation of objects. Art form expression. The embroidery patterns sold by folk artists are all based on the characteristics of embroidery, using needle holes to poke many holes to indicate the stitching lines and distinguish the connected outlines of different images. This method gives folk paper-cutting a unique and unique style and enriches its techniques. When I was collecting styles in Huaiyang, Henan, I saw an old lady cutting childrens shoes and pricking lines on them with the tip of the scissors. It was more vivid than the pinhole lines of folk artists, showing a three-dimensional interest and giving people a leisurely look. Feeling of pleasure. When I was collecting styles in Shanxi, I saw rural women cutting small paper-cut patterns to decorate childrens hats. Since the patterns were directly pasted on and used without embroidery, these patterns were cut very delicately and formed a pattern. An exquisite sketch style. Most of them are cut by women with children, and there are also old ladies with good eyesight. They all keep some of their favorite patterns.
Folk paper-cutting provides patterns for embroidery, which is only the first step in expressing the artistic form of embroidery. Embroidery ultimately relies on various stitching methods to lay out embroidery threads into surfaces, and uses colors to express the artistic images of various objective natural objects. . If you use too many thin threads for styling, you will not be able to give full play to the color expression of the embroidery thread. Too many fine threads will make the color of the embroidery visually gray. Therefore, most of the paper-cut patterns used for embroidery are different from the "double hook" line shape of traditional Chinese painting. The artistic form of object image is an artistic expression of a scene form, which is very different from the translucent folk paper-cut. Pay attention to the expression of "face" in embroidery patterns, but each "face" should not be too large. If the face is too large or too many, the embroidery will become stuffy after it is embroidered, and it will take a lot of effort and materials. A large surface will also make the embroidery stitches larger, and too long embroidery threads will affect the durability of the embroidery. For paper-cut patterns used for embroidery, unless necessary, the "surface" should be expressed in linear ways to varying degrees as much as possible. To express the linear expression of the surface and not use too many thin lines, you must master a "degree". It is not good to exceed the "degree", and it is not good to not be enough. This is the yardstick for the artistic level of this type of paper-cutting (excluding single patterns, and special customs and habits) users). The embroidery paper-cut pattern is the same as the light-transmitting window grille. Due to the shape of the use location, the external form shows a variety of magical features.
There is a kind of tiger-head shoes specially designed for one-year-old children. The pattern is to fold paper and cut it into a tiger shape on the front and side, stretch it flat and embroider it on the upper, and then make shoes for children to wear. Look, both feet are two little tigers. When we unfold this tiger-shaped paper-cut pattern into a plane, we will find that during the unfolding process, the tigers body is separated along the midline of the back into a frontal head, with two side images of the body, and the two sides are symmetrical through the central axis of the head. Why does this phenomenon happen, are women the idols of female celebrities? It is certain that this is not unconscious, it is the deliberate work of women. Using the two side images of the tiger on both sides of the shoes is to use the shoes to dress up the childrens shoes as little tigers (this is the key to solving the mystery). This is done firstly because they want the tiger to protect their children, and also hope that the children can be as strong as the tiger. Secondly, it is out of their pursuit of aesthetic taste, which is the most fundamental motivation for them to adopt this art form. If it is just because of the above psychology, this form is completely unnecessary. There are many other forms to represent the tiger in the collection of folk paper-cut patterns to choose from, such as the usual form of using a frontal head and side body.
They did not do this. They wanted to "realistically" reproduce the tigers form, even though they had not necessarily seen a tiger. folktales and legendsDescription, so that they can understand and understand tigers. As mentioned before, objective natural objects are the representation of visual perception in the understanding and memory of working people, and are the synthesis of the inherent characteristics of each part in the face. Standing in front of an animal, what you see from the front is a frontal head shape, and when you look to both sides, you see a side body shape. These two side shapes are not visual mirror images of the front position, but constant side impressions of visual perception. A complete and comprehensive tiger shape, in their view, is a frontal head and two side bodies. Childrens shoes provide them with the conditions to express this understanding and fulfill their wishes, and their talents can be brought into play. The so-called constant impression is the brains memory of visual perception performance. This memory of representation is stable and unchangeable in human thinking. What critics often say: "Based on subjective impression alone..." refers to "constant impression."
This double-headed phenomenon is caused by the splitting of visual mirrors caused by constant impressions. The impressions on both sides are connected from beginning to end along the midline of the spine. In the paper-cutting, there will be a cow with four legs facing outward. If it is not seen from beginning to end, When connected, they become two cows, and when only the heads are connected, a double body is formed. Tigers can behave in this way, cows can behave in this way, and fish can also behave in this way.
