The lacquer painting “Fishes and hornworts” by artist Nguyen Huyen Viet Art View introduced here was created in 1975, when the artist was 60 years old, the age still full of impulse and the technique is even more skilled in shaping.
Strong impulse is a conspicuous feature of Nguyen Huyen’s paintings, especially in lacquer paintings. He painted with sharp lines, the contrast of light and dark was often reached to the maximum, making his paintings often appear as splendid as those of baroque art (according to Quang Viet).
In “Fishes and hornworts”, at first glance, it looks like four goldfish and a few branches of hornwort as decoration as often seen in other “goldfish” paintings, but clearly, Nguyen Huyen used the “impulse” of the span in shaping to let viewers capture a gliding rhythm fast and strong, not gentle and graceful like other goldfish depictions. Even the use of spots of mother-of-pearl (rather than eggshells) in the lake background reveals a qualitatively different Nguyen Huyen. He lined the bottom with gold to shape the body of the fish, covered it with paint and then sharpened it to cubes, not using strokes to color to create light and dark.
