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.