Wednesday 10 July 2013

100 talismanic forms of the character Shou, representing long life


100 characters as published in a 1975 Thames and Hudson book on Taoist diagrams and calligraphy which themselves derive from The Religious System of China written by Jan Jakob Maria de Groot (1854-1921). Each character is beautifully balanced and harmonious, moving in and out of symmetry with a satisfying rhythm.


For this silkscreen, I traced the characters on to mark resist film and had to change pens as I went, when the original ran out of ink and then finding a similar drawing line was difficult. The unplanned change in line quality adds more variety to the set, I hope.