Glistening Dew is a singular breakthrough in Peng Kanglong’s exploration of the monochrome qinglü or “blue-green” landscape. In this new work, Peng Kanglong’s layering of blue tones becomes so intense that the visual result approaches the lushness of oil painting and the chromatic intensity of pure mineral pigment. In order to give shape and form to his intensified blues, Peng Kanglong uses pure ink and untouched white to bring both light and shadow to his saturated and layered colors. And in order to add a point of chromatic contrast to balance the intensity of his new blues, Peng Kanglong incorporates gold pigment for the first time. With this new mode of color intensity and chromatic contrast, Peng Kanglong enters the realm of Tang Dynasty jinbi or “gold-blue-green” landscape.

Peng Kanglong divides the composition of Glistening Dew into light and dark, day and night. On the right, he floods his composition with peony blooms and buds, stems and foliage painted in a subtle infinity of dilute cool blues and warm greens. Here his brushwork is absolutely exquisite and his use of layered washes nuanced and refined. His combination of dilute color tones and untouched white creates the visual effect of flowers bathed in the even, silvery light of a cloudy day. On the left, Peng Kanglong fills his composition with a thicket of dense foliage painted in a much darker palette of saturated blues modulated by the addition of black ink. To this textured thicket, he adds peonies painted in boneless style in pure ink, contrasting untouched white and highlights of pure cerulean blue. The use of much darker color tones, pure ink and ghostly white highlights evokes the experience of seeing outdoors in the dark—a lone patch of night sky being the only source of light to gently illuminate the dense thicket of foliage and blooms from above and behind. Even in his use of brushwork—double outline in the light, where we can see detail with clarity, and boneless in the dark, where we cannot—Peng Kanglong seamlessly evokes our differentiated experience of seeing during the day and seeing during the night.

At the center of the composition, Peng Kanglong paints what looks like a mountain or boulder roughly one third in light and two thirds in shadow—marking a time during the diurnal cycle when dew, condensed over the preceding night, glistens in the morning sun. Normally, a landscape form like this would be painted in cunfa or texture strokes and indeed Peng Kanglong uses Wang Meng’s version of pimacun or “hemp fiber stroke” as re-interpreted by the early-Qing Buddhist monk painter Shitao to render the jade-green portion of the form. All other parts of Peng Kanglong’s boulder/mountain, however, are rendered using brushwork from flower forms in place of landscape texture strokes. The resulting impression is uncanny: with the exception of three garden rocks all rendered in jade green tones, the rest of Glistening Dew’s composition is filled with only flowers and foliage, and yet, the overwhelming impression one gets from this painting is not of flowers but of landscape, and a monumental one at that!

《白露烁烁》是彭康隆在单色青绿山水探索上的一次独特突破。在这幅新作中，彭康隆对不同色调的蓝进行了层次极为丰富的渲染，其视觉效果接近于油画的华丽饱满和纯矿物颜料的鲜艳浓烈。彭康隆用纯墨和留白，为这饱和且层次分明的蓝色描绘出明暗与光影，进而赋予它生动的形状与造型。为了增加色度对比，以平衡这种全新的蓝色色调的强度，他首次加入了金色颜料。通过这种新的色彩强度和色度对比，彭康隆进入了唐代金碧山水的境界。