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.   

Lost

I've been avoiding the brush; avoiding most everything for that matter.  I still can't accept the fact that she's gone; the person who gave me life.  Not when it was so sudden.   I am desperately trying to find a way to unclog my head.  There are too many cross talks.  I just don't know how to organize my thoughts.
'
I'm not trying to fill a void, it's just like there's less meaning to all the things I do now.  It's difficult to imagine a grown man was still motivated by the thought of the "NEED" to hand in "Home Works".   I suppose the simple act of turning in some piece of work suggested not some sort of  an accomplishment, but it was a way to show the I was doing fine, and nothing in my life had altered my routine.

To help me get back on the horse I decided to go back to calligraphy, to a piece that I had studied in the past.  The beauty of revisiting this study is that it is familiar and I just need to follow and emulate the Te, and the circumstance of this piece of work is meaningful.

I am referring to the work of Han Shi Te by Su Dongbo.

Han Shi ( Cold Food Festival ) is a festival that falls around the time of Qingming Festival ( Tomb Sweeping Day).  Qingming ( April 4th or 5th) is a day to show respect to ancestors, thus tidying up the tomb site  and offerings of food and drinks and incinerating paper money (currency of the underworld ) are traditional practice.

Legend has it that Han Shi (Cold Food Festival) was ordered by an ancient Emperor as a redemption for his horrific mistake.  The Emperor was seeking the service of his friend, who did not aspire to fame nor glory, and avoided the Emperor by vanishing into the woods with his aging mother and entertained a life of simplicity.   In his infinite wisdom the Emperor decided to force his friend to reveal himself by setting fire to the woods,  subsequently causing the death of his friend and his mother.  In his remorse, the Emperor decreed that no fire or burning was allowed for 3 days.  Thus there was no way to cook and food had to be consumed cold, hence the Han Shi Festival .

Su Dongbo (Su Shi)  (1037-1101)  was a famous calligrapher, poet, foodie and a statesman of the Song dynasty.   He somehow angered his Emperor and was banished to a remote place.  During his exile he held a post in name only but received no stipend, thus was living in poverty.  One could only imagine the smorgasbord of emotions that he had to endure.   Shrouded in the shadow of injustice he wrote the Han Shi poem, where he referenced the Han Shi Festival as a means of noting the seasons.  His calligraphy Han Shi Te  hence became one of the gold standard for studying the walking style of brush calligraphy.

He wrote about the incessant cold rain and the dilapidated hut he dwelt in was like a boat in a rising torrent .  He was trying to cook on a broken stove with wet hay and only sensed  it was time of the Han Shi Festival by noticing that birds were carrying incinerated paper in their beaks.  He was far removed from the central administration despite his continued desire to serve and he couldn't even fulfill his duties by observing the Qingming Festival.  He talked about how all the blooms had wilted  and fallen overnight, perhaps drawing a parallel of his own fate.

What made this poem famous was the picture it portrayed of the desolate bleakness of his emotional state.  What made this piece of calligraphy astounding was the air it exuded, of the author's anguish, frustration and longing, by means of the irregular font size and spacing and the different ink tones.  His was not your typical calligraphy piece.  It was a testament to his circumstances.

I reacquainted myself with this piece by performing the usual ritual of shadow writing; following the brushstroke in my head and analyzing how each stroke was shaped and delivered.  My first job was trying to emulate his brushstrokes.  I started to copy his writing.

My next goal was to emulate the whole piece as a complete organism.   I would try to gauge the spacing, the ink tone and the rhythm in the script.  I tried to find the punctuation, the phrasing of written passage.  I needed to sense where the fermata is, which words were pizzicato and which words should be treated like legato; to borrow a few musical terms.  Perhaps I was over-analyzing or was being pedantic, I found myself hesitating with my brush edge and pressure.  I found myself  already arriving at the end of the brushstroke and I still wasn't able to form the correct shape.    This was like a novice horn player having difficulty with finding the correct embouchure, causing  the notes to come in late or drag on for longer than intended.

I devised a method to combat that.  I thought I would write in light ink first and my emphasis would not be on the quality of my brushstrokes, but rather on the placement and the relative size of the words.  I could thus start the emulation with less pressure, by dealing with the more graphic aspect of the project.  My intention was to re-trace my light ink with the proper brushstrokes, done to the specifications of Su Dongpo.  I was eager to see if this plot would work.

To help ease my trepidation with this emulation, I chose an old brush that somehow survived 18 years of abuse and really was not fit for calligraphy.  I figured that would help me to not place too much emphasis on the quality of the brush edge and pressure etc. but to seek out the spacing and the form of the whole piece.  I was treating this work as a painting or sorts.  I spotted the position of the columns of  characters by creasing the paper along those lines.

Somehow I mis-calculated the numbers of columns I needed and the words did not fit into the original places.   I tried another piece, and still managed to omit the last column ( where Su titled his work).   Is there hope for me?!

To be frank, I wasn't disappointed with my efforts, so far.  The brush strokes actually were not that bad.  They were free and energetic.   I think the fact that I was using an old brush and all that gave me an excuse to fail, thus taking off a lot of pressure from me.  Such was my psyche.   I wished perfection right off the bat, and I had to will myself to be not so demanding.  I was my own worst enemy!   I was always so uptight about everything that I just couldn't relax.  I recall that I used to bowl a little bit and my scores were always hovering around 100.  After a couple of beers I could come near 150.  The score would fall back to 100 as alcohol left my system.  My bowling score was an uncanny indicator of how much beer I had to drink!

Anyways my next step would be to use a good brush and attempt to do "real" calligraphy by tracing my light ink.  Hopefully I could now be paying more attention to the brush edges and pressure, and not so much in the form and spacing.  That is my intention anyways.