Composition on a one-day trip to Daoxugou

My teacher likes undeveloped and artificially carved environments. What he wants is a natural and simple scenery. In that kind of place, the only farmhouses we can live in are old and dilapidated courtyards, with different thresholds.

When I first started sketching a few years ago, I would often trip over the threshold that reached up to my calf. I would often walk into a door and stumble without warning, solidly. He took a big bite to the Bodhisattva on the Eight Immortals table. After suffering a lot of frustration, I finally learned to be smart. Whenever I see a door with a height of more than two meters and a thickness of more than ten centimeters, I will subconsciously raise my legs.

Later I understood the mystery. It turned out that in this remote mountainous area, the folk customs were conservative and backward, and the thoughts were feudal and conservative. The height of the threshold is equated with the family's local status and so on. The higher the threshold, the higher the status it symbolizes. I was so happy at the time, how dare I live in the home of the leading Murakami?

So I started to pay attention to those thresholds and this isolated village.

Although the weather in the mountains is not too hot in July, it is still so dry that it makes people feel depressed. We started painting from five o'clock in the morning to about nine o'clock in the morning. People walked by in the mountains from time to time. Occasionally they looked back and glanced back, but they seemed to be afraid of disturbing us and stayed aside without saying a word. The only people we had conversations with were some children from the mountains, who were in their teens but did not go to school. They ran around in the mountains and fields. When they saw people drawing, they would surround them and timidly remain silent at first. Then some bold children asked. The sentence "Is the painting the golden haystack in the distance?" I answered yes, and they gradually became chatty and asked me how much the painting cost. I rubbed my forehead and laughed, telling them that it was just a study and not for sale. A child asked if I could give it to her. I nodded, picked up the painting, and asked her to wait for it to dry before taking it away. During this period, I asked them why they didn't go to class. A group of children frankly said that their families were poor, or that their ancestors had no scholars, and they talked about the theory that they had heard from their parents that studying is useless. Suddenly, I remembered the high threshold of the fortress and the dark hall inside, as if it had been cut off by the door for thousands of generations.

When the painting was dry, a lot of fine dust was blown by the wind, and it was embedded in the powdery paper. The children did not dislike it and held it up like a treasure. I began to feel that this scene was not so pleasant.