Style, Rootlessness, History and Belonging

by mariebarry

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust

As I left the people at the çini atelier today with the knowlege that I would not be seeing them again for three weeks, a profound sense of longing came over me. Today marks exactly one-third of my project time completed. Perhaps for the first time, today I truly realized the length of time I have spent here with these people and how incredibly close I have become to them.

I am going traveling and I could sense their apprehension at my leaving. They worry about my safety and well-being and, moreover, I think we all sensed today the passage of time that is leading toward my true departure from them in six months. They suggest regularly that I simply move here with my family and take up a permanant job as a Turkish traditional painter, which is perhaps only humorous to me, being so accustomed to beng a rootless sort, as we Americans often feel ourselves when walking on the soil of ancient civilizations. Several weeks ago I met a man who claimed to be a direct descendant of the Muslim people’s most important prophet, Muhammad. Today I learned (so long as my Turkish comprehension could understand) that the atelier I am learning in will be producing a tile panel for a female descendant of the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

Despite a long history and deep connection to traditions, Turkish people are eager to adopt the people they care for as Turks. They tell me often I seem like a Turkish girl, or a Muslim girl, depending on who is adopting me. Several people have agreed to serve as a surrogate mother while I am here, and for them, it makes perfect sense that I could live out my life here as a Turkish traditional tile painter. Although this is an idyllic image of a quiet life with a job where I actually make a living painting for fifty hours a week, I know the foreigner within me that sets me apart from this world while simultaneously drawing me into it.

The foreigner within me continues to feel the strong pull of the symbolic, the individual, the laxity of law that comes standard with the condensed version of history. İ imagine the underside of a leaf not as a contrasting color to add energy but rather in a subtle shift of shade that designates the shift between the soft upper part and the smooth underbelly. Twilight has no red. My foreign parts come forth to refuse and then retreat in shame at the ways in which they risk my opportunity to learn.

The word the Turkish traditional artists use to describe my work often is “Farklı,” which makes me a great deal more uncomfortable in Turkish than it would in English. Farklı comes from Arabic and means exactly as it sounds when it wells up from the back of your throat: different, or divergent. Whenever they call it farklı, İ know that farklı runs the heavy risk of simply being wrong in a collectivist society where there seems to be a much stronger consensus on what is right and wrong. They walk by my table and exclaim to each other that İ have invented another solution using my own tarz (style, form, genre). Despite the fact they are kind and care for me, İ often notice this seems to make them slightly unnerved, or at least a bit amused. Strangely bewildering to them is that İ have never once noticed the shading of a Turkish rose which İ shaded rather backwards based on Western ideas of perspective, highlight and shadow on a form. My accent is heavy of individualism and English even when İ strive to be as they are for the purposes of learning.

İ am learning to occasionally cringe at the blatancy of my accent and at my tarz, remembering the words in Orhan Pamuk’s novel about Ottoman miniature painters, which has given me strangely fitting advice for understanding the workings of the contemporary world of traditional tile painting. İn “My Name is Red” he writes, “What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.”. İ understand the guilty hand is the foreign hand that misunderstands the form in favor of the foreign form. İ continue to strive to maintain a balance between fearless experimentation and invention, so exalted in my homeland, and the shameful feeling of stepping outside the bounds of the collective understanding of form and reality.

Following the reemergence of my voice, the situation changed. İ asked to begin painting on non-broken tiles, marking the long-awaited and much-needed beginning of the next process of learning which has included making designs–using combinations of traditional motifs, with the the help of my teacher and her strict training yet newfound flexible willingness to let me try my ideas–drawing the designs by hand with graphite onto the tile, inking the drawings on the plate, choosing my own color palette– with some feedback from the others–painting the designs, and waiting for the great surprise, or shock, that comes when the tile returns from the kiln.

For the past ten days, I have been going along like this quite happily, completing three tiles, watching another demonstration on how the glass-like clear glaze is laid over the painted designs, and painting my previously most-loved drawing of the lotus design on a two-tile panel colored entirely in the more challenging technique of tonal painting with only blue and turquoise.

Although these days of working more freely and purposefully have been blissful, they also heralded a new reality for me: the reality of the kiln. My first unbroken, hand-drawn tile, which I had stubbornly excluded red from, came to me from the kiln with unsightly chunks of the green glaze peeled from it, revealing the white, unglazed tile surface. I added a bit more green glaze to the craters and sent it to the kiln again; an action that may or may not prove fruitful. A worthy try nevertheless on the parts of people helping me, who care so much about my happiness, and who have brought me so much.