Lacquer Painting (Tranh Son Mai)
Lacquer is one of the painting materials in Vietnam. It is the exploration and technical development of the traditional Vietnamese paint industry (lacquer craft) into the lacquer. However, the word used to call lacquer is often understood to use Japanese and Chinese art paint products. Grinding technique is a big difference between foreign handicrafts and Vietnamese lacquer paintings.
Lacquer painting uses traditional paint materials such as lacquer paint, cockroach paint as a binder, and lacquer, silver, gold and pearl shells, etc. drawing on black stature background. The painting can be painted and sharpened many times until the effect the artist wants. The last is polishing pictures.
Lacquer has “paradoxical” points: if the paint layer is dry, the painting must be kept in an air-tight and high humidity cabinet; If you want to see the picture again, you have to abrade to see the picture.
How to make lacquer painting?
Lacquer can be divided into several main stages: bundles cuttings, decoration, grinding and polishing.
1. Stem pack: Using alluvial soil – workers can now use paint and stone powder – pound it with paper and cuttings and fill in the cracks in the wood. Each layer of paint is lined with paper or curtain. After that, fish gills must be chiseled to install and attach the paint to the horizontal wooden splint behind the boards (wooden planks) to prevent cracks along with the fabric. Then let the wood dry completely cuttings are painted front and back. This stage is to protect the panels from being waterproof, termite-free, and not dependent on the environment for shrinkage. Handling the board more thoroughly, extending the life of the objects to be painted, each lacquer work has a life of 400-500 years.
2. Decoration: When obtaining the aforementioned piece or the carvings of vases, or other clothes, the makers of the items must apply the stages of attaching and sticking the coloring materials to the work first such as shell eggs, nacre, gold, silver … then paint and then grinding flat, then use color.
3. Grinding and polishing: Because the varnish has mixed colors to paint, the gloss submerged in the color core creates the depth of the painting, so after each drawing must be sharpened. The ancients used dried banana leaves as scratch paper.