By Charles Recknagelis,
Tea and Carpets Blogspot
BAKU and TEHRAN, April 18, 2008 -- Long before
most town and city carpets are woven, the design is recorded on paper.
The drawing, or 'cartoon,' is what the weavers follow to create their patterns.
And when the designs are complex, preparing the cartoons becomes an art form in
itself.
Traditionally, cartoons have been drawn by hand on graph paper. Many producers
maintain that system. Their designers use colored pencils or paint to create a
portrait of part of the carpet that shows the border and as much of the field as
needed to establish the pattern.
click
here to see high resolution image |
Vugar Dadashov, the head of Baku-based
Azerbaijanrugs, uses this life-size design of one-quarter of a 1.5 x 2 meter
Akstafa rug. It took a designer four days to draw and his weavers have been
using the cartoon for three years.
Because this Akstafa design is symmetrical, the weavers can complete the
remainder of the rug's pattern themselves – though they have to mentally flip
and reverse the cartoon to do so. It is an exercise in abstract thinking for
everyone involved, and one that dates back to the very earliest days of the
settled carpet trade.
But when carpets are non-symmetrical, or contain surprise elements in some parts
of the field but not others, the cartoons have to show more. Then designers may
draw a half of the rug or even the full rug. And at that point, drawing a carpet
can become as time-consuming as any other form of portrait art.
Hossein Attaran, of Carpet Heritage in Tehran, says it can take a month to
hand-draw a full carpet with an all-over design. For that reason, he and many
other producers have increasingly turned to digital design systems to speed the
work.
Attaran says that a designer can produce this digital image of the full-field
pattern of an antique Bidjar in about a week. The image is later printed out on
paper sheets that are sent to a village weaver near the town of Bidjar to hang
on her home loom as she works part-time on the rug through the course of a year.
click
here to see high resolution image |
But even with software, designing remains a
painstaking job and the designer still must make what traditionally are his or
her own contributions to the drawing. That is, to give a personal interpretation
to the motifs and choice of colors so as to infuse the work with life.
Where do the designers get the training to do this?
In many rug-producing countries, the education was once solely by apprenticeship
but today it is increasingly formal.
Dadashov's designer is a professional painter who graduated from the Azerbaijan
State University of Culture and Art. She works full-time for him and their
inspirations come mostly from photos of rare antique Caucasian rugs.
In Iran, universities in many cities now offer courses in rug design. Tehran has
two such famous schools. One is the University of Art, which offers a Bachelor
of Arts program in carpet design for both men and women. The other is Al Zahra
University, which includes studies of carpet design as part of its Bachelor of
Arts program for women.
Attaran says the programs include familiarity with the great carpets of the past
but focus most of all on the production of the past 50 to 60 years. The
students, who must be talented artists to enter, learn the styles of each of
Iran's many carpet-producing regions so well that they can draw each one's
characteristic 'guls,' or flowers, in their pure form.
That is partly so that the designers can preserve the identity of Persian
carpets against ever increasing numbers of would-be imitators abroad.
"I have seen drawings of carpets outside of Iran and they have such a foreign
accent, deliberate or not, that they have taken the original character out of
the rug entirely," Attaran says. He employs two designers who have graduated
from university programs precisely to keep his own production accent-free.
An Iranian designer can make the equivalent of $ 400 to $ 500 a month – a
reasonable income in the local market - and has a status comparable to that of a
graphic artist in the West. Increasingly, the designers are women, both because
there are more women art graduates than men and because of economic reasons.
With Iran's official inflation rate running around 20 percent, many women
welcome a designer's salary as a supplement to their family income. But many men
who are the sole breadwinners for their families say they now must find
professions that pay higher salaries than the carpet industry can offer.
About the author:
Charles Recknagel is an American journalist living in Prague. He travels from
time to time to the east. That is where he caught the carpet bug. He now tries
to keep up with his interest by blogging (Tea and Carpets Blogspot:
http://tea-and-carpets.blogspot.com).
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