The Final Word on the Last Stone

 Final Words on a Last Rock

In the years from 1983 to 1985, during my studies at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, a vendor selling rocks from Inner Mongolia would come by the school every six weeks or so to sell his wares. He would lay a cloth out on the open ground onto which he spilled out polished rocks in all shapes, sizes and colors. These all had one side that was flat for the purpose of carving out stamps. The carved stamps, or seals, were an integral part of Chinese painting, so the eager clients for these beautiful stones were the professors of painting and calligraphy at the Academy. 

The stones were marvels of simple artistry, shaped so that they would fit neatly into the grasp of the artist’s hand. Sometimes I missed buying the best examples because I was too dumbfounded by the beautiful display to make an offer while the professors had already begun their bargaining. But the haggling gave me another opportunity, because I never haggled. It wasn’t in me. Whatever the rock seller asked for I gave him, often while the others were still haggling. In this way, over the period of two years I amassed a substantial collection of rocks for seal carving. I carried many of these around in the decades that followed: from China to Holland, from Holland to New Jersey, then finally to South Carolina. 

The traditional Chinese calligraphic form that carvers used for seals was called Zhuan, or seal script. Many of these characters were more pictographic than modern Chinese (modern here meaning about the last two thousand years). The script had originated on ancient Chinese bronzes from the Shang and Zhou dynasties. In 2015 the script was designated a UNESCO world heritage cultural art form.

While many professional seal carvers that I knew had a treasure trove of zhuan characters committed to memory, when carving my own seals I generally relied on textbooks such as the Metal and Stone Dictionary (Jin Shi Da Zi Dian). Every now and then, when I had the occasion, I would carve a stone seal or two and use the prints in my painting. To expand the collection, I added hard linoleum into the mix, but the carving wasn’t quite as crisp as the rock carving, nor was there the allure of the rock itself as an art object. 

After so many decades of carving, the collection that began with the vendor from Inner Mongolia came to its inevitable conclusion. I had at long last come to the end of my collection of uncarved rocks. That last uncarved rock was a milky white pleasingly curved beauty. It felt good to hold. But what to write on it? Should not those final words be a suitable summation of the long rocky journey? 

Initially, I was inspired from looking at an exhibition by modern calligraphers at Yale, to carve only a picture on this last rock. There was an artist in this exhibition, Yi Qian, who carved nothing more than his own face into the rock, stamping his identity onto his work using a visual portrait rather than a signature in ancient script. So I designed a stylized drawing of my long face and large eyes for this last rock. But I could not resist the desire to fashion some script into the hair. It took a while before settling on what would be the final words. The phrase “Final Word,” seemed to be the ideal choice. It helped that the zhuan style calligraphy form for “final,” or “hou” had the appearance of a braid. Reading more about this form, I found that it had a secondary meaning of “queen.” The last rock is pictured below.