| rjhowe@erols.com
First, I want to thank Wendel for permitting me to use this potpourri
session as a basis for a salon, for his very real assistance in composing
the opening photo essay, and for his active participation as the salon
proceeded, the latter including either initiation of, or contribution to,
at least four threads that required considerable careful, time-consuming
work on his part. Vincent Keers was also a noticeably active participant
in the discussion, trying with some graphics he created to help us “see”
what he sees. The large number of posts in this salon is likely the result
of having a relatively large number of quality pieces to examine but also
of the work a number of people did in drawing our attention to particular
facets of them. Emmett Eiland’s report in Hali of some sentences Harald
Bohmer had written about natural and synthetic dyes and color harmony
served to trigger a vigorous discussion in which we seemed to conclude
that while synthetic dyes do not exhibit “pure” colors, it may be that
they tend to contain a narrower range of colors than do most natural dyes
and that (although some still tussled with the notion of “color harmony”
and what it might be) this may help explain why some of us experience a
lack of color harmony when some synthetic dyes are used and more harmony
when natural ones are. It was also important to me to hear from an
experienced worker with natural dyes that these if incorrectly mordanted
might fail to produce any color or might produce light colors but that
they will not “run.” This violated my commonsensical, man-on-the-street
picture of things in this area. Wendel’s possibly “Shahsavan” pile rug
provided a basis for a two-part 28 message long discussion of tesselation,
and of what it is and is not, that seemed to me to provide both some
creativity and clarification. Wendel’s suggestion that “blunted” sides are
ubiquitous in weaving designs and the search for possible explanations of
this phenomena, opened our eyes to something some of us may have been
vaguely aware of but have previously passed by without noticing much. This
thread too attracted a large number of posts, several of which probed the
extent to which this tendency might or might not be related to technical
factors. I, at least, got some clarification on what the distinction is
between “zili” brocade and “sumak.” And Wendel demonstrated that useful
threads need not be long. He may not have convinced us all to see “birds”
everywhere in his small Senneh kilim but it was useful to have that
interpretation, and his post on his Zoroatrian textile and its use was so
helpfully graphic and usefully conclusionary that there seemed little more
to say. My own effort to get images of varieties of “broken borders” in
front of us, was seen as unneeded and less useful but it was not, as some
thought, unserious. My thanks to all the contributors here for making this
what is seems to me to have been a useful salon. Regards, R. John
Howe |