Today I would like to show you another dancheong work that I created. It is not going to be an ornamental motif. It will be a picture with the dragon in dancheong style.
At first I would like to tell you some interesting fact about the dragons in Korean art. Almost all dragons which appear in dancheong paintings and other branches of K-art, are blue and yellow beings. It is caused by the fact that Korea borrowed chinese Five Elements Theory (오행, 五行) in which blue dragon is a guardian of the East and yellow one is a ruler of the Center. The pictures which feature those two dragons fighting each other for the fire pearl, are really common in Korea. But what about other dragons? Are there any other colour variants of the dragons in Korean art? Yes, there are. The pictures featuring them are not so common as the examples mentioned above, but there are some. I think that good example of such pictures are dancheong paintings of Seokjongsa Temple (석종사) in Cheongju (청주시, 淸州市). One of them presenting green dragon inspired me to paint the image I am presenting now in this post. You can see green dragons of Seokjongsa in Korean Kanhwa Son Buddhism - Special Report on Onmark Productions website.
It's time to say something about the picture itself. The dragon was painted by temperas on the wooden board with dimensions 55 x 50 cm. I used brush sizes: 4, 2, 1. The Green Dragon was created as a mix of inspirations. It was not only Seokjongsa's green dragon, but also picture of the fighting dragons (yellow one versus blue one) presented on Exhibition of Dancheong Paintings Created by Intangible Cultural Properties No.48. As for the clouds and the dragon's background I was inspired by decorations of Gyeongbokgung Palace (경복궁, 景福宮) and common dancheong motifs of the temple drums. This work was created two years ago.
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