Read the seal of Chen Hongshou on the other side, that is, this side "asks Mei news", which is a typical Zhejiang Zhu Wen four-character seal, Miao seal, basically equally divided printing surface, it is still the "personality of the Han seal" style -
(Chen Hongshou "asked Mei news")
In my early years, I copied Chen Hongshou's "Ask Mei News", but at that time I did not understand the seal carving, that is, I purely felt that it was "good-looking" and "literary" strong, and felt very beautiful. There is not only the dynamic feeling of "inquiry", but also the beauty of "feeling" brought by the fragrance of "plum blossom", and even the beauty of the true feelings of the human voice of "booing cold and asking for warmth".
(Wax plum blossom)
Another reason was that Wang Wei's poem was being memorized at that time, and the four words "Ask Mei News" were condensed from one of Wang Wei's "Three Miscellaneous Poems", and Wang Wei's poem was:
When a king comes from his hometown, he should know about his hometown. In front of the window of the coming day, the cold plum is not flowering?
Poetry is very wonderful, a wanderer who has been in a foreign land for a long time (not necessarily Wang Wei himself), met his hometown old friends in other places, aroused natural homesickness, so he was eager to understand the hometown style and personnel mood focused on the "plum blossoms are not flowers?" " in the midst of the inquiry.
After turning into a party seal like "Ask Mei News", the mood is even better. We know that the role of the literati seal engraving is often not practical, but to express certain thoughts and feelings, the owner of this seal is Wang Xi, the painter, the original name of shu, the character heart, the number of the new tree. He is also best at painting plums, just imagine, if this square seal is used for plum blossom painting, humanistic emotions will inevitably increase greatly.
Also take a look at the side sections:
(Side paragraph of "Ask Mei News")
In the side paragraph, it is written: The heart is like a painting plum, carved as a gift, Yu will go south to bid farewell. Ugly June 10 and another mansheng.
There is Chen Yuzhong's supplement to the letter of succession: Yu ZijiaChennian and Mansheng have been friends, so far for more than twenty years, the two hearts have been imprinted on each other, and although the seal of words can be the same, its heroic spirit is beyond yu' reach, and if it is based on work, there is no more than enough to let go. The heart is like this, and the number is written on it. Autumn Hall.
Obviously, Chen Yuzhong admired Chen Hongshou's "heroic spirit," and the "second Chen" was both a close friend and admired each other.
At a glance, the biggest chapter feature of this square seal is obvious, that is, diagonal echo, because these four words have natural diagonal echo characteristics in the glyph: "ask" and "breath" are upper and lower structures (in fact, "ask" is a semi-enclosing structure), while "mei" and "elimination" are left and right structures, but this does not mean that the author can do nothing.
In fact, he made a lot of adjustments:
1. "Ask" and "Breathe" emphasize horizontal painting and strengthen the response to the angles. To achieve this, the author made seal adjustments, such as "asking" and "breathing" both exaggerated the head, so that the lower "mouth" and "heart" expressed as much horizontal posture as possible. The most prominent is the "heart" part of the word "breath", which is squashed to express a more prominent "horizontal" potential. As shown in the figure:
(The "mouth" and "heart" that are squashed to strengthen the horizontal posture)
2. "Plum" and "Elimination" emphasize vertical painting and strengthen the response to the angles. In order to achieve this, the author deliberately cut off the middle two strokes of the "meat" part of the word "elimination" to reduce the horizontal potential it may bring, and then carved the "each" part of the "mei" word into a slightly longer vertical diamond shape, which also cut the "horizontal" potential it may bring. As shown in the figure:
(Treated "Shaw" and "Every")
3. Squeeze and narrow the "question" and "interest", so that they correspondingly occupy a smaller printing area and form a diagonal echo; widen the "plum" and "elimination", so that the two words of the left and right structure occupy a larger printing area, and also form a diagonal echo. As shown in the figure:
(Diagonal echo of the footprint)
In fact, the "ask" and "breath" narrower left and right, strengthening the visual effect of the horizontal line stacking, while the widened "plum" and "elimination" also make the longitudinal line more prominent.
There are also two points worth mentioning:
The beauty of the image is worth mentioning: the deliberately carved part of the word "elimination" or deliberately carved into a thick and thin dotted line at one end also symbolizes the flower bone of the wax plum to some extent, and the vertical and horizontal lines that should be straight on the printing surface have even been bent, which seems to symbolize the old trunk branches of the plum blossom tree.
The broken border is also worth mentioning: the border of this square seal has two particularly obvious breaks, one is the right part of the word "ask", and the other is the lower part of the word "breath", which is actually an echo of the diagonal breath, and it is also to weaken the excessive thickness and density of the "question" word right "door" frame and the "breath" word "heart".
([Pudding Reading] No. 121, some pictures from the Internet)