Couldn't find an ugly rug.
But I know people seem to dislike this one. It's a Gendje dated 1329. So in 1911 an ugly rug was made for me. And I love it. It's happy, has the eastern sunshine in, and very, very worn. We even refurnished, two new chairs and a new coach, new white marble floor, demolished a wall to make it fit in.

Friends reactions....Ooooh, ..........how daring.......(long silence).
I love it.

Best regards,
Vincent

It makes a statement.

Patrick Weiler

Since I'm technologicaly challenged I can only describe my horror rug. Imagine a common 1930s Hamadan with a vivid rust orange border and dark blue field that is mostly worn to the foundation - my good friends have said, "well there is 'some' pile left" Imagine that the center of the middle medalion has been painted with a felt tip marker. Imagine that the rebinding is of a blue that was never found in nature. That's just a start.

However, imagine your narrator, at an age when he could only crawl, tracing the design with pudgy fingers while the sun heated the rug and illuminated the flying dust motes on a winter day.

That's why I have the rug, it's my first visual memory - c1952 - and perhaps my first aesthetic experience.

Greg

Your story suggests just how demanding the prerequisites of true aesthetic apprectiation of oriental rug coloration might be.

In his (now collected) catalog for the Sotheby's NYC (1993) sale of what was reputed to be perhaps the "middle third" of his personal Turkmen collection, Jon Thompson, the English rug scholar, told a similar story.

He said that he was for a time a teacher of English in Istanbul. His job provided him with an Armenian friend and lots of time to visit the bazaar. Thompson said that he could not find rugs that were satisfying to him there. He said that he only figured out later that the rugs on the floor that he had grown up with were natural dyes and provided him a standard that the newer, synthetically dyed rugs in the bazaar, could not meet.

Shortly after the sale, a letter appeared in Hali in which the writer said that Dr. Thompson had raised the bar considerabley on the likely prerequisites for truly appreciating oriental rug colors: apparently one was disadvantaged unless one had been, for all practical purposes, "born" on them.

So you can see that your "disdavantage" is likely widely shared.

Regards.

R. John Howe