Assembly of Chinese Zodiacs

I started painting rams and used them in my personal greeting card for the Chinese New Year back in 2014. Did it on a whim…thought it was a novel idea especially in a western culture.  I had no ambition to proceed any further.  Somehow it grew to be an annual project, something that I actually looked forward to.  I accomplished my collection of the 12 zodiac animals last year, the horse being my last project. I would like to present my 12 animals here, in chronological orders, starting with the Rat,

 

 

And a group photo

Light at the end of the tunnel

As I was sitting in my chair receiving my last dose of medication through my vein I couldn't help but to acknowledge my journey in getting this far.  Strangely enough, I also thought of my calligraphy piece at home and the journey it had taken.  

There were similarities.  Especially with all the unexpected turns and segues and subsequent follow-throughs.  Plans had to be modified, remedied and explored, with the goal of a successful completion.  The cliché of putting one foot in front of the other spoke volumes.  My colossal blunder became my confidant, my mirror and my reward in my hours of need.

I needed to do something to that piece.  I couldn't just abandon my comrade in a corner and allow cobwebs to collect.  

I built a frame for it.  Lumber was so expensive now, but I could justify that as a labor of love.  I used spar varnish as coating for my frame.  I loved that no nonsense peasant feel.

I applied several sprayings of a matte polyurethane on my work.  My setup was to display the piece naked  without a glass cover.  I wanted the carved marks and charred edges to be displayed in as a raw state as possible.  The polyurethane coating was just for added protection from the elements.

Then something unexpected happened.  The ruby red paper border was showing a lot of mottling.  I suspect those patches were the result of either errant starch when mounting my calligraphy or the glue adhesive somehow seeped through while mounting the entire piece onto the cardboard substrate underneath.

I was distraught at first; frantically searching for ways to cover these patches up.  I changed my mind once I test fitted the piece with the frame.  The mottling was a perfect match for the spar-varnished frame.  It looked like an antique piece.  I couldn't have done a better job of antiquing, if that was my intent.

I decided to make a statement with my piece by adding light to it; light that would show through the carved out brushstrokes.

A quick search online and a few clicks later I received a kit for ribbon LED light that was battery powered with a remote.  I was going hi-tech. 

I installed the strip of LED along the inside edge of my frame behind the cardboard.  The theory was the lights would illuminate the back wall onto which the piece was hung, thus the hollowed out brushstrokes would appear as lit characters.

https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipM_Bi_4pGbgsIPtoTM3HCv2RO0rvakFqOIvZDja/photo/AF1QipM8VQI7_pTioYBVvb3jQj3O57EKyJbmtcjRsDLM

Wow, that worked.

It was not as bright as I had envisioned, but it worked.

Somehow I saw the light at the end of the tunnel.   Happy to have witnessed the completion of a project that went through metamorphosis.  My butterfly!

Time to clean up my not-as-planned calligraphy project

Today is April Fool’s  Day.  A fitting for this fool to put some final touches on the mess that he has created. 

The Cold Food Festival piece is basically done, for all intensive purposes. I’m just doing quality control ( if there’s such a thing) to clean up the edges of the hollowed out words and to glue back lifted paper.  Forceps are used to carefully lift any unglued paper such that starch can be re-applied to secure it  

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I have tried to insert strips of folded sanding paper into the hollowed out voids, hoping to make the voids neater.  The sanding actually causes the paper along  cut edges to lift, creating lots of dog ears which requires re-starching the areas.  A real pain in the butt.

Somehow I have this bright idea.  Perhaps I can incinerate away the small pieces of chads.  I have several mosquito repellent coils that I can use in lieu of  joss sticks.  The coils are probably some sort of citronella infused incense sticks and I remember them as a necessity when I was a kid growing up in Hong Kong.  We didn’t have air conditioning and we slept with our windows wide open for circulation and cooling purposes.  An open door policy for these gnats.

Breaking the coil up into smaller fragments and lighting them up to burn off the paper lint.

 

The process seems to work fine except for the fact that the mosquito coil needs to be relit constantly. 

The paper and the corrugated cardboard draws too much heat from the small ember and snuffs it out quite rapidly. 

So what would be a more sustainable ember or flame?  How about a gas lighter powered by lighter fluid ?

WOW that’s a cinch!

Now I just have to be ready to blow out any flames from starting from inside the corrugated layers. 

This is a view from the back of the piece before the cleanup. I’m using this as an indicator of how messy it looked due to the incomplete excavating of the board. 

And after the tidying up,

I digitally flipped the photo to get the mirror image, showing what the front might have looked like, based on the current photograph, the words are almost legible now. 

It’s pretty amazing, especially when compared to the original calligraphy work,

One thing I had not intended on is the singed edges around the hollowed out words. The flame from the gas lighter not only cleaned up the paper lints but also charred the cut edges of the paper in the process. The 

By carefully placing the flame and extinguishing ant errant flareups I can actually lay down a singed edge and it’s making the brushstrokes more vivid. Aesthetically pleasing. 

I’m also struck by strings of events that leads me to this stage of my project. The project almost ran off the rails with my miscalculations and misguided visions.  Each remedy and course correction that I applied results in a different presentation without deviating from my original intent of creating a hollowed out calligraphy piece.  This project helps me to deal with my medical problems by allowing me to concentrate and visualize something that is fun and challenges that do not result in any real harm other than my pride. 

There’s also some irony here, well sort of.  The calligraphy is about Cold Food Festival, where open flame is discouraged and yet I’m garnishing my project with the assistance of the flame. 

Another interesting tidbit I manage to dig up is that the original calligraphy artwork was almost lost in fire. The first near disaster happened when the British and French incursion army burnt down the Old Summer Palace (圓明園）during the Qing dynasty and the second incidence happened later in the hands of a private collector.  The third recorded incidence occurred in 1923 when there was an earthquake in Tokyo, Japan and the artwork was in the hands of a Japanese collector. The ensuing fire from the earthquake almost took away this piece of calligraphy.  Currently it safely resides in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan. 

I found these images online showing the charred lower edge on the original copy,

Perhaps it is fate that I resort to playing with fire with my Cold Food Festival calligraphy piece. 

A colossal blunder

I’ve made several miscalculations with my monumental project. Grave oversights. I’m trying to figure out a way to salvage my project.  The idea of having to trash my Hanshi Festival ( Cold Eat Festival) poems calligraphy piece nauseates me. 

To begin with, my premise was totally wrong.  I assumed that by using my Rotozip tool on paper cardboard was such a clever idea.  If veneer posed no problem to my Rotozip bit, cutting through cardboard paper would be like a hot knife through butter.  The harsh reality was that because cardboard did not have the density of veneer or gypsum board, the bit was not able to make a clean track through the cutting. Instead it just shredded the paper into lint that refused to vacate.  It was far from the crisp cut edges and hollowed out trenches that I was expecting.  Also the torque of the Rotozip was a little too much for the corrugated cardboard and it was difficult to to precisely place the bit, especially if I had to start or stop the drill in the middle of carving out a line. 

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In my infinite wisdom I switched to my Dremel.  I wasn't thinking clearly when I picked my next bit.  I thought it was on steroid and should be a piece of cake in hollowing out my cardboard.

I picked a word with straight lines to test my new setup.  The lint problem remained and the bit was disappointing in its performance, perhaps due to its weird shape.  That bit was probably better suited for carving and shaping than hollowing out something.

I finally decided on a more traditional bit.

This bit was fine in control and efficiency and all that, but it had no answer for the lint problem.  I resorted to using my tweezer to pick off the lint.

I eventually decided to give my Exacto knife blades a try.  I was hoping that I could achieve crisp edges with more success.

I was right, but my surprise was that these sharp blades were no match for the corrugated cardboard.

The cardboard had a sandwiched layer of undulating paper with peaks and valleys. When the seemingly sharp blade cut into this layer, it did not meet the necessary resistance to make a clean cut and the paper tore and left pieces of chads.  These chads were stubborn and subsequently required the use of a tweezer to be removed.

The insert showed the exposed corrugation which was resistant to cutting and the resulting chads.

In the end I was using the Exacto for my initial cuts and finished with my Dremel and tweezer to dig out the chads.

Obviously this whole project did not progress as I had expected.  The project changed abruptly from the moment I first turned on my Rotozip.  The lesson I learned over the years was how to salvage my miscalculation.  How to mitigate my mistakes. 

As luck would have it, or extremely bad luck, depends on how one looks at it, I was having some grave health problems all of a sudden, which totally blindsided me.  New health problems kept popping up and I just couldn't get a break, always worrying about when the other shoe was going to drop.

As I had to retreat from my usual activities, I was thankful that I had this project to occupy my mind and time.  I also looked at this project as a parallel that tested my resolve.  Was I just going to throw my hands up and said I screwed up.  Of course not.  So I must deal with my health problem with the same resolve.  I stayed positive and stuck to the agenda of what needed to be done next to move forward.

I had faith that my efforts would not be in vain.  

This was what I had so far and no I couldn't tell you the significance of hollowing out the words.  I just felt like doing it.

A monumental project, I hope

I kept looking at my carvings on my spaghetti squash peel and I was itching to do something similar, but in a much grander scale.  I wanted to do the same thing with the calligraphy of Su Dongpo's Cold Food Festival poems.

First order of business was to fix my calligraphy work onto a substrate that I could easily carve into, hopefully rendering the brushstrokes as void spaces.  I chose double walled corrugated cardboards. 

I stacked and glued two pieces of such cardboards together such that this back support was never going to buckle on me.  I was also hoping that the thickness of the boards would make the hollowed out brushstrokes more dramatic and three dimensional in appearance by creating a shadow inside the hollowed out carvings.

I then glued my calligraphy onto the prepared cardboards, running my stiff bristle brush over the paper to ensure adhesion.

My project was ready for carving.

I planned to use my Rotozip with a bit that would gouge a channel through material,

I had used this tool for a project before and I absolutely enjoyed that journey.  That project was done on thin wood veneer and the Rotozip made it a cinch.

My work of the Cold Food Festival Poems was the result of countless times of copying and emulating the original work, which is housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei.

For Chinese brush calligraphy students, we use the image of the original as our copybook.  This is somewhat different from the elementary copy book for alphabets, such as the Speedball Textbook for Pen and Brush Lettering.  A page from the Speedball Textbook:

The original Cold Food Festival Poems:

Su Dongpo composed the poems while he was banished in exile, putting his anguish and despair into words. 

I shall attempt to translate the poems,

"I have spent three Cold Food Festivals now in Huangzhou, I regret the passage of Spring each year and yet time does not relinquish itself.  The spring rain this year has been relentless.  For two months now it feels like autumn.  Lying in misery, I hear that the crabapple blossoms have fallen off already, their  petals wilting on the muddy ground.  The devastation is as if someone hauls off all the flowers in the deep of night.  I feel helpless.  No different from a youngster fallen ill, only to wake and realize that his hair has turned gray, and is now feeble.

The river is rising and reaching my hut and yet the rain shows no sign of ceasing.  My hut is like a little skiff struggling in this soup of haze.  I am trying to cook some grub, with damp reed as firewood in my dilapidated fire pit.   I have no idea what time of the year it is, until I see crows with burnt paper-money in their beaks.  I now realize this is Cold Food Festival.  I wish to serve my government, yet it has kept me out.  I want to go back home and pay respect to my ancestors' tombs, but home is thousands of miles away; unreachable.  My heart is dead, the ember has been extinguished."

I'll be remiss if I don't explain what Cold Food Festival is.  Cold Food Festival ( Hanshi Festival) is a holiday that falls around the Tomb-Sweeping Festival (Qingming) in China. 

Legend has it that in China during the Spring and Autumn period ( 770-476 BC) a nobleman Jie from the State of Jin had no interest in politics and avoided at all cost to serve the court by vanishing into the forest.  After numerous failed attempts to lure Jie to serve him, the duke set fire to the forest to attempt to flush Jie out.  Jie and his mother were found burnt alive, their bodies still hugging a Chinese Scholar Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum).

The duke atoned by banning all fire, not even for cooking,  for a period of time as a memorial for Jie. Hence the Cold Food Festival.

Qingming or Tomb-Sweeping Festival is a traditional Chinese holiday when tombs of our ancestors and beloved get a visit.  It is customary to bring food and incense sticks and specialty paper money folded in the shape of silver bullions.  The tomb site or headstone will be literally swept clean and made  presentable. Incense  sticks and paper money will be burned, the smoke carrying the offerings to the underground/Heaven, symbolically anyways.  

The reference in the poem to crows carrying burnt paper money in their beaks was how Su Dongpo poetically hinting at Qingming when people burn offerings of money to the deceased and Cold Food Festival, using the setting to introduce the source of his feeling of abandonment and despair.  He wasn't able or allowed to fulfil his filial duties.   

Happy Year of the Horse

 MAY YOUR YEAR BE AUSPICIOUS

BLISS BE UPON YOU

 

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Horsing around in color, continued

I’ve decided to change the perspective of my 4th horse in the painting.  I intend to portray it more convincingly as the trailing horse in the pack by presenting a shorter side profile and a more frontal view  the hope that the viewer will sense the horse emerging rather then just traversing across the field.

Adding the 5th horse which is mostly obscured and in the background, I have my pack of five,

The current arrangement conveys more drama and movement by taking advantage of the size differences between front and back, and the lean of the leading horse.

Time to color them.  Whinny for me, horses!

I must admit, my horses are more convincing now,