Introduction to the work:
Cao Dali is an oil painter with unique style, which has much to do with his experience. He was born in Fencheng, Shanxi in 1934, and went to Indonesia with his parents when he was 6, and began to learn oil painting when he was 13. He went back to China in 1957, and went to study in the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Art. After graduation, he began to work for the creation studio of Beijing Fine Arts Company. He was transferred to Beijing Painting Academy in 1980. During the Cultural Revolution he was persecuted because of overseas relations, and was deprived of the creation right. After he restarted painting, he introduced fantasies in his work, and dislocation of human and environment, thus created many works that combine illusion and reality. His representative works include: Broad-leave Epiphyllum, Small Boat, etc. This work was adopted from Wind Mill &Mushroom Cloud. The left part is a twisted human body that shows the depressed life. The right part is mother and son immersed in happiness, which shows the desire for happy life. The conflicts between depression, and desire twisted together with spring and volcano, and expressed the artist's thought on life, implicated that the volcanic recreation of life and the ingenious division of realistic mode, and the weird color allocation are his artistic features, and also show his "dream in life".