Sunday, February 13, 2011

VALENTINE'S DAY

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. I want to write about a carving I did for my wife for Valentine's Day, a single Chines character. 

It is the Chinese character 'love' and I did it using the intaglio method of carving. The same methods I used for my first project '4' and '8' except that it was a Chinese character. I took the character from a set of Chinese characters that I have that are more artistic than the usual ones that are seen in a book or on a computer screen. I painted the character red because red is a happy color and I wanted the character to express joy and happiness.

I have a very old book that analyzes the origin of Chinese, their origin , etymology, history, classification and signification. The book is simply called Chinese Characters,  it was originally published in 1915 but it has not been published since 1965,  however, I did find it on Amazon. 
http://www.amazon.ca/Chinese-Characters-Etymology-Classification-Signification
I took a snapshot of the page that refers to the part of the character in the middle that is the radical. The radical gives the meaning of the word.



The radical 'xin' means heart and it used in Chinese characters that express feelings and emotions.

I did not mean for this post to be a lesson in Chinese etymology, far from it. I just wanted to show the carving that I did to express my own feelings of love for Valentine's Day.

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

1 comment:

  1. there is a word "heart" inside love, which means we love with heart

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