BismillahirRahmanirRahim
Edith Kiss (L), a Hungarian, and Asta Erimer, a Lithuanian, are both l earning the delicate paper marbling art of ebru and see it as an escape from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
There are things that are simply immaculate, at first sight. The mere sight of a tulip on a marbled paper, almost surrealistically delicate, is one such beauty: no wonder there are people that travel the whole wide world to İstanbul to learn how to replicate this feat.
On a very hot summer day in the city, where you would have to bribe a person to step outside of home to crumble into pieces under the sun, I went to Sütlüce, to Miniaturk where free marbling (ebru) courses are available: I was intrigued. On the way, I thought to myself, “Oh, how Sütlüce resembles Palestine!” With its splendor of sun-drenched construction sites, sun-drenched grey buildings and all tones of grey as if painted the color on purpose to attract even more sunlight. I entered Miniaturk and passed the kids riding the little train among the mini-sized Blue Mosque, the Maiden’s Tower and Dolmabahçe Palace.
Still wondering how people can bear even to play games under the sun, I entered the tent where a bunch of women were caught up in the delicacy of marbling tulips, acacias and roses on water. It was as if a cloud of tranquility was separating this room from the outside world. It is always said that if you have something evil in your soul, you can’t manage to make a shape on the ebru water, hence one almost paints the colors of one’s soul on the water when one is doing ebru. I always thought that was a myth; however, how can the tranquility of the ebru painting room be explained while it is 40 degrees outside and car horns form a choir of madness?
Ebru is totally an act of absolute patience since both the paint and the water need an exact consistency achieved through the addition of hard-to-find elements. For example, to thicken the paint, formed from 100 percent natural mineral-based pigments, you need öd (cow bile — yes, a cow’s bile!) to mix it with. To thicken the water and give it the desired consistency to preserve the painted shapes on its surface without allowing them to be spoilt, you need to mix in the powder of the geven plant, which flourishes in Anatolia. I remember all those thorny bushes in really dry regions of Turkey and wonder how one can pick them without hurting oneself, let produce a powder.
Nur Gökalp, the assistant of Turkey’s world famous ebru artist Hikmet Barutçugil, explained to me how delicate it was to achieve this exact measure of consistency in addition to explaining the rather mysterious history of ebru. Not much is known about ebru’s past apart from the fact that it was born in Uzbekistan and later came to the Ottoman Empire and has been continually practiced in the region covering Turkey, parts of Iran and other regions of the Ottoman Empire. Nowadays, people from this region somehow connected to ebru in their home country come to İstanbul to see ebru in its cultural capital. Hence there are students who come from all around the world to attend ebru classes held by Hikmet Barutçugil and his assistants. One marbling artist from Bukhara, Uzbekistan, came all the way to Turkey just to take this workshop. Socializing through art is the most fun way to make friends. So here people play a wonderful artistic game together. The maddening exactness and sizeable kit needed for ebru makes me think it would be less fun, and certainly less educational, to try the art at home.
Miniaturk, under the auspices of the İstanbul Municipality’s culture and arts division, wanted to set up a culture and art workshop such as this one at Miniaturk to provide people with the opportunity to enjoy learning traditional arts. Initially targeting people living in the vicinity, the workshop soon saw students from around the world. The best thing about these courses is that they are free. For me, this is too good to be true because we do not live in a country in which each citizen normally feels that his cultural satisfaction is taken at face value by powers that be. It is generally the reverse: We feel like we want to be fooled and rendered more ignorant by the “powers that be” when we watch TV programs that adults are supposed to follow. However, at this course at Miniaturk, which started as a trial project about two months ago and is slated to end this month, it really feels that people in charge of this project do feel obliged that a 12-million-strong city like İstanbul should be a place where everyone could learn about their cultural heritage without having to spend an outrageous amount of money.
I am told that the Japanese show a lot of interest in our ebru. They also have marbling in Japan; however, there are no individual designs on marbled paper in a style that can be considered Japanese. So they come here to learn to make individual shapes such as roses, tulips, etc. and most of all to look at this art from a different angle. On a hot day like this, I felt lucky to meet Edith Kiss, a Hungarian, and Asta Erimer, a Lithuanian, at Miniaturk’s ebru atelier as they took turns on ebru pieces.
Kiss, from Hungary, studied visual arts in Hungary and came to Turkey with the European Volunteer Service (EVS) to do volunteer social work. At Toplum Gönüllüleri Vakfı, where she works, she saw a poster about this course and came and registered right away. She also gives art workshops in Anatolian cities such as Mardin, Van, Samsun and now ebru will also form an integral part of her art workshops in Anatolia. She thinks that this course here is great because the professors are really professional, all the material is provided and it is free. She is very careful when working on her ebru pieces as she takes precise measures and proportions the shapes she works on.
Erimer, as you can tell from her surname, is married to a Turkish man. She moved here about six months ago. In Lithuania she had been working at managerial positions in banks and commerce companies for a long time. Since she came to Turkey she has been trying to adjust to the new country and system and it seems ebru is a very calming method of adjustment to the at times crazy pace of İstanbul. She heard about this course by word-of-mouth and decided to enroll. She never painted before in her life but when you observe her working a green leaf upon the water into a more edgy leaf with thorn-like patterns around it, it appears that she has gotten used to the delicate style of ebru in quite a short time.
Or perhaps, judging by the immaculate tulips and daffodils waiting to dry in all the corners of the atelier, you might think that only pure souls get to be the present students in Sütlüce, since the colors in their soul come out as perfect shapes on the marbled water, no matter how slippery its surface.
21 June 2008, Saturday
FULYA ÖZLEM İSTANBUL
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