On Memories of Rattlesnake Tails and Where I Found Them Again

by mariebarry

“Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad in foreign lands.
I saw the next door garden lie,
Adorned with flowers, before my eye,
And many pleasant places more
That I had never seen before.
I saw the dimpling river pass
And be the sky’s blue looking-glass;
The dusty roads go up and down
With people tramping into town.
If I could find a higher tree
Farther and farther I should see,
To where the grown-up river slips
Into the sea among the ships,
To where the road on either hand
Lead onward into fairy land…”

-From “Foreign Lands” by Robert Louis Stevenson

İ began again slowly upon my return with a tree of complexity, discreetly mimicing one İ had seen in a book picturing the gardens of Paradise. My hand thought he had forgotten, but İ was told my brush was broken. İ spent some silent moments with the razor trying to diminish the brokenness of my early brushstrokes.

While İ was gone from the workshop for three weeks for holiday and for research, a Turkish artist who lives on the hippest street in the hippest city in Turkey and who knows çini, Arabic calligraphy and miniature painting came and sat in my seat for a week. The painter, who shares the room with my teacher and İ, told me the artist had humorously called herself by my name since she was filling my empty chair. The place felt warmer upon my return, knowing it had not been left empty. She made a beautiful plate which had just come from the kiln when İ returned depicting the famous love between Leyla and Mecnun, with the couple’s heads bound together in some spirit-like trail of fire. My heart pounded at the empty space between the forms. İt reminded me of the works, the dozens of works, İ made seemingly centuries earlier with heads bound together in endless trails of hair. İ wondered at my tight floral compositions, how much furthur they could carry me.

Coming from a humanist West where there was never a ban on faces, where our dogs sleep with us in our beds, and where we trample the mud of our shoes all through our homes, i guess something in me missed those flame-like moments out in the wilderness, like Leyla and Mecnun. İ reflect upon days of youth spent in the solitary wood with friend, laying in the mud-strewn bed of leaves sorting out how the branches intermingle above, the smell of earth heavy on the back of my throat, thoughts like threads connecting and wandering through all parts of the landscape. İ wonder what blend of mud-stewn Appalachia and dust-covered ancient flower arrangements İ will find when İ have freedom again.

My teacher told me that İ have looked at enough çini now to start making my own compositions, but İ know İ have looked at enough to know İ am not ready for such responsibility. İ still gaze in marvel and awe at walls covered in çini, in the way İ have heard people speak of oil paintings but which İ have rarely myself experienced. When İ visit historical çini sights, İ crouch down to the floor to try to find the panel that was put in the less prominent place so İ can find the humanity of the artist in the simple slip of a brush, misplacement of the color, or forgotten dash of blue. The moments of bleeding color, slightly misshapen circles, and seven-petaled flowers in a field of six-petaled penç flowers are like four-leafed gems in a field of clover for my understanding.

İ was left alone recently and my teacher called me to explain to me how to fill my time after completing the painting on the two-panel tree design we had made together. She told me to start a new composition with two tiles to my liking. İ considered making an interpretation of a classical Ottoman design of two mythical lion-like animals beneath a lotus tree by instead replacing the lions with the nearly mythical Okapi drowning in a field of lotus and sticking out its purple tongue to reach for the plant. İ thought that might make a nice interpretation of the unseen, which is real, and of the mythical, turned reality.

Upon second thought, İ decided to save my Okapi for a few weeks since it would probably require explaining in Turkish and to instead tackle a floral design without the help of the floral motif virtuoso, my teacher. i was thankful a book of İznik çini was left in our room and İ leafed through the pages to find a floral motif İ had not learned yet. Postponing my own idiosyncratic ideas in favor of learning more motifs, İ was pleased to discover the pomegranate flower, in shades of blue, turquoise and white, much like the ones İ have drooled over on multiple occasions. İ thought the smaller flower or grainlike forms in the composition looked exactly like rattlesnake tails and İ found my imagination wandering back to my mud-strewn life before. There were several styles to choose from, including symmetrical and swirling. İ choose the symmetrical one painted on a plated from the sixteenth century, finding out happily that it was, in fact, not perfectly symmetrical.

İ took to discovering the secrets of the forms while translating the circular plate to a square flat tile, giving it the painter’s love of the limitless symbolic potential of a window. İ fell deeply in love with the çini forms, which did not give me the same discomfort in the markmaking as the tulip once had. İ found myself thinking of Applachian folk art, as the floral forms in the plate seem to share with folk art the same emotion of the first glance at the mysteries of wilderness, with rattlesnake tails.