Marbling in Istanbul

 I showed up to the five story studio and sometimes home of Ali and Betul at 10:30 for a lesson in Turkish marbling  (5 stories of about 10 square feet each floor, think wide ladder instead of palace).  Paper marbling is a process by which multiple colors of paint are dropped onto the surface of treated water, mixed around to create a pattern (though not mixed together) and then transferred onto thin paper.  You see paper marbling at the beginning and ending of old books and it looks like, well, multi-colored marble.   My bookbinding teacher in Jerusalem was a paper marbler and I’ve been fascinated by it for years though too intimidated to try it myself.  Turkey has a long history of paper marbling with a unique brand of embellishment including flowers and leaves.

"It's sometimes called painting with water”  Betul says to me from her top floor studio where I am torn between jaw dropping views of Istanbul and what’s happening in the seaweed thickened water on the table in front of me.  Betul makes it look easy and while there is a kind of natural flow to raking and fanning the colors, my lines are no where near as uniform as hers and my peacock pattern is laughable – squished flat like a heavy sandwich instead of full like a balloon.  But I thoroughly enjoy the afternoon selecting colors, dropping them onto the sludgy water to see them expand and moving them with metal awls and rakes of various sizes.  I’m only kind of embarrassed when she selects a generic artsy English language playlist on spotify that starts with Simon and Garfunkel and includes many songs I already know.  Is my “type” so knowable? I think, being sure not to drip ox gall infused paint onto my black jeans.   But then I don’t care and I discover what ultramarine looks like with powder blue and crimson red.   

(Ignore the "musical credits" in the end - observing copyright
law won out in the end.  I am a librarian afterall.  Just pretend you
are listening to The Flaming Lips..)

After our session Ali invites me to stay for lunch that Betul’s mother has made.  It is a simple meal of fresh green beans with ground beef and the ubiquitous “Shepard’s Salad” known by a million names throughout the Middle East and North Africa: tomato, onions, cucumber, parsley, lemon, olive oil.   Betul’s mother teaches me the Turkish word for thank you and delicious and I watch first when a pail of creamy yogurt is placed on the table and then dip my spoon in after each bite along with everyone else. 

“Why did you choose paper marbling?” Ali asks me, given the other options of calligraphy, felting, tile painting and sedef – traditional Turkish wood block carving and printing.

Happiest I've ever been...perhaps

“I like the colors and the patterns....and the possibilities”

“Do they talk to you?  The colors, do they talk to you?”

Unsure of how to answer I cock an eyebrow towards Ali.

“They will.  He says.  Send your husband away. They won’t talk if he’s there.  But send him away and they’ll talk to you.”

Well, you heard the man Max.

It's not personal. 

Sperm Donor

Got your attention, huh?

The past few months I've been working on my artist book skills...and they haven't come easily.  I've wanted to make books about a lot of things lately: living in morocco, infertility, changing family dynamics, good books I've read, pictures I've taken, dogs and husbands I love, Moroccan rug prints, the list goes on and on.  But whenever I sit down to tell a story that is personal I'm completely bereft of ideas and enthusiasm.  I don't know if I'm afraid my technical skills won't live up to my emotional attachment to these ideas or what, but It took me 8 months to get halfway through a book about our trip to Portugal last year but then I hated it and dismantled it for parts.

So, Max and I have been pulling prompts from a grocery sack the last few weeks.  He has to write about them and I have to create a book around the prompt.  The first one we drew said "A Golf Caddy Learns a Dark Secret".  Since my reading and thinking habits trend non-fiction I immediately hit the google to research golf scandals and the like - thinking I'd take my inspiration from real life.  (Max wrote a delightful piece of fiction.  Our brains work very differently.)

I came across this crazy story about a caddy who claimed he was seduced by his golfer solely for the purpose of getting pregnant.  He later sued her saying he was an "unwitting sperm donor".  Close enough for me.  I know it's a super weird thing to make a book about, but for some reason it worked for me and I was able to try a few new techniques I'd been wanting to experiment with.

The design and construction are really simple - mostly I wanted to see if I could finish a task and stick to a theme.  Telling a story I had no personal attachment to was a really great exercise.  It let me step back and see what worked and what didn't and how to construct an idea using mostly images.  I think after a few more goes I'll be ready to tell my own stories.      

"Sperm Donor" 

 Accordion Fold  

Paper: Arches Cold Press, Ingres

Matte Medium Image Transfers 

  Text taken verbatim from newspaper clippings