THE CHALLENGE OF THE LETTER S

When I interviewed LETTERCUTTER JULIE REZAC 24/05/2011 for my blog I asked her if she had a favourite letter that she liked to carve?

Julie: I like carving the S because S remains a challenge every time, for me. Lots of times I get it wrong, but when I get it right, then the letter S is the most delightful letter ever. I think you have to visualise a letter to understand it and cut it and if you don’t understand it, you won’t cut it right, which is kind of funny because you think ....it’s drawn on, but somehow you have to know that letter really well before you can cut it. I also find a lower case e difficult, because there is such a fine point of where it can go wrong and where the angle has to be just right, at a certain point, or else the whole letter is wrong. So, an e is tough too.

If you have been following my own journey into wood carving you would have seen some of my own attempts into mastering this skill. So as a follow on project I decided to try and cut the letter S. I had an old piece of Cedar wood from which I once made a shelf. The wood had a crack in it and broke into this amazing shape, I had been wondering just what to do with it. It seemed to nice to just burn on a bomb fire or throw away. So I decided to cut a few S into it. Julie is right the S is indeed a challenge.

An interesting fact about the Cedar wood I used, it comes from Lebanon and its timber is sometime known as the Cedars of the Lord. The timber was used by the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians as well as the Phoenicians. The wood was prized by Egyptians for shipbuilding; King Solomon used them in the construction of the First Temple in Jerusalem and the Ottoman Empire also used the cedars in railway construction.