Since I collect on a budget, I am not above admiring fragments and Dennis had a couple in this Rug Morning program.
The one that appears first in the initial salon essay with Dennis' face is also talked about again as Rug 26.
Although the range of color in this piece is not that of the great Chodor trapping that (deservedly) takes up two full facing pages as Plate 49 in the Mackie/Thompson catalog, "Turkmen," in 1980 nor that of The TM's Chodor main carpet fragment that is Plate 51 in that same publication and which was/is examined in Carol Bier's exhibtion on Symmetry and Pattern,
http://mathforum.org/geometry/rugs/gallery/22lg.html
Rug 26 has for me very real attraction and part of that is it's rich coppery color.
The field elements of this piece are drawn with a great and satisfying clarity that benies its relatively restricted palette. Small amounts of black/browns and white are used with great effect.
In Turkmen, 1980, Jon Thompson rehearses a debate about whether the "Ertmen" gul (the one used in this fragment) is an indicator of age in a Chodor main carpet and concludes (disagreeing with Moshkova) that the Chodors used this gul on very old bags but that older Chodor main carpets seem to have the "tauk naska" gul and that the Chodors began to use the Ertmen gul on their main carpets sometime in the 19th century.
The discontinuous meander of the border of Rug 26 does seem very old to me and I wonder if others have that impression.
People talk about responding to a piece that "moves" them and this fragment does that for me.
Regards,
R. John Howe