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, 

I'll pay you more if you paint me one in color

Years ago during an Open Studio event a visitor came to my home to view my works and was interested in one that was done in black and white.  

Black and white paintings, or photography for that matter, convey a somewhat artistic interpretation. Firstly, the association to objects through the conventional color scheme is virtually eliminated. Ambiance and composition assume a more critical role. Works created with ink brushes on Xuan paper additionally rely on the nuances of the brushstroke to guide the viewer not only into the artistic aspect but also into the craftsmanship of the painting. I surmise that appreciating and enjoying black and white works of art necessitates a certain level of sophistication and imagination, not mere personal preference.

So the visitor posed a proposition, "Could you do the same painting but in color?  I'll pay you more".

The reason I'm bring this up is not because I am being a snob or needing to stand on my high horse by implying a lack of erudition from that visitor, but I actually want to try to paint my horses in color.  Same players, same arrangements.

After all, I am just horsing around.  

Here comes the leader of the pack,

Next up,

My leading horse is leaning in more aggressively now, and is painted bigger to give it more of a proximity presence.

Now comes the third horse, 

Making it better

I like my painting better after I applied the multitude versus singles alteration to the grouping of my horses.  However I still find some glaring booboos, one of which is this particular animal,

I must have expanded its chest as an afterthought, attempting to make the horse appear more robust.  The right front leg is now out of place.  In the attempt to line-up the leg with the chest by adding to what I had painted, I inadvertently created a fearsome arm wrestler with uneven arm sizes.

The more I look at it the more I notice this annoying glitch.  It is like when we are told not to look at someone's huge zit on the forehead, that's the only thing we land our eyes on.

After days of brainstorming, I come up with a clever solution.  I think.

I am going to add some dilapidated fencing around the horses, as if they are held in a pen.  I am using the fence posts and the crossbars to hide my mistakes and to divert attention.

The yelping dog is an afterthought.  The agitating canine is reacting to the equine pack trying to escape the broken corral, lending a hand to the storyline of this painting. 

And my friend digitizes my painting to this,

I love it!

Playtime-Second Half

My spaghetti squash with calligraphy has been drying under a slight weight to prevent the shell from curling up too much.  It is time to commence the second half of the game.

I intend to etch out the calligraphy by following the brushstrokes with a cutting tool.  My plan is to have the writings appear to be hollowed out fonts.  My Dremel is summoned for the job.  I am going to use an Rotozip bit, assuming that is the correct tool for my fun game.

I am getting a quick lesson in humility.  My assumption is not quite correct.  The Rotozip bit is too harsh for the brittle thin skin of the dried squash and takes out a whole chunk of the shell before I can cuss.  I believe my bit was designed for drywalls. 

The alternative is a burring bit.  I should have used that in the first place.  The project takes longer since the burring bit does not remove as much material as readily as the cut out bit.  The hollowed out lines are much better defined though.  I suppose there's always a trade off.  So am I a dentist now?

I have a piece of red craft paper handy so I used that as an underlayment to the hollowed out writings.

I like what I am seeing.  I am going ahead with more pieces of the squash.

I am also curious to see what the cut outs look like when light passes through the openings,

I think the light show is much more captivating than the carving itself.

This is fun.

Someone asks me why I do this.  Is there a purpose in all this?

"I do it just because I can"

Still goofing off

I am going to try to paint my horses again.  I haven't given up yet.

My last attempt at painting 4 horses was ok.  One of the horses looked deformed, afflicted with osteomalacia.  I promised myself to do better.  Time to redeem myself.

I shall concentrate more on form and gesture this time around.  A silhouette comes to mind.

The equine on the right seems a bit off. Its shoulder looks strange, and its head is placed too far to the right. Or maybe its front legs are too far to the left?

Too late to cry over spilled milk, I am forging on.

 

The front left leg of the last horse still looks unnatural, I still need to study how to place the bend.

Then an idea comes to me, I should insert a horse behind the first two horses, to diffuse the bad shoulder of the second horse.

In this composition, the head of one horse protrudes from behind the left horse, utilizing its tail and rear quarter to modify the shoulder line of its adjacent counterpart. The three horses appear to have merged into a cohesive entity. Composition wise we have a multitude of three contrasting with two separate ones, fitting in with the idea of variation and harmony  

While the initial appearance may be somewhat chaotic or jumbled, the composition is functionally effective. It presents three horses grouped together, followed by two additional horses. This arrangement imbues the work with energy and dynamic motion.

I will use this formula for my future attempts.