Portland Art Open

Reza Antoszewska works in Ebru, a technique dating back to ancient Islam.  In her work, she combines the practice and history of the art form with references to western art history and contemporary sensibilities.  With it, she hopes to not only foster an appreciation for a historical art form, but to also promote respect for another culture at a time when we need it most.  I met her at her home in Portland, where she showed me her works an materials.

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What will you be showing at the Art Open?

I’m going to have 20 original works. On cotton paper and silk There’ll also be a Presentation on and Demonstration of the Art Form at 2 PM on Saturday . It will be in room 403 at Mile Post 5.

 Could you describe Ebru as a technique?

It’s a monoprint technique. You work over a substrate. You have to forget everything you know about painting, because it’s such a different process; and everything you know about printing because it’s also a different process, there’s no machines, this is it. You can use all kinds of stuff to lay down the paint, and then you use other tools to work into it, like combs, styluses, and atomizers.

You need a tray that contains the medium that you lay the paint down on. You need to treat the print surface with something that will hold the paint. On the medium, you first lay down the paint and then work the paint once it’s in the tray to get the imagery you want. Finally you lay the paper down for the print.

So you’re really getting into the craft and the materials that you are using.

I feel like with this, it’s exponentially true. Even the humidity can effect how this stuff acts and reacts. There’s some people who drive miles to get certain kinds of water because they feel like it works better than other kinds. I just use distilled water for my paint. You’ve got a chemical process going and there’s a lot of variables to play with, that you can learn to work with. It’s sort of like life, you can have an expectation. Sometimes, you really have to struggle to get exactly what you want out of it, and sometimes it just happens. I even like having a sort of relationship with it where I have an idea of what I want to do, but the totality of it is being worked out as I’m doing it. Which is more like my everyday life is (laughs). I’ve accepted that it’s not going to work out how I think, but it may work out even better and more interesting if I just follow and work with what is going on. Other times I work toward a very specific result.

How are these calligraphies applied to the marbled paper? Do you marble the paper first and then put the characters over top?

That’s right.

With this one I put the bright layer and cut these masks. I then applied the masks with a temporary glue and applied my second blue layer. You can, of course, do the opposite.

So it’s a process of masking

Correct. In Qayuum, you have three different masks done - and there’s a technical part to this that an Ebru artist would appreciate more. I haven’t show this to my teacher yet but I think he’s going to like it. First I put the green, and then the next layer was the yellow. So I masked here and here, where the image was going to be, and then did the yellow. Then, I masked out here and masked out the edge, and placed the red. and then, I did the opposite of that, and cut out the image, and then covered everything except certain lines. And that way it gives the illusion that the blue is behind the green, but the blue was in fact the last layer.

 

Light Upon Light, I meant to be muddy. It was working out of the symbolism that’s in here. This image, this is the Arabic here - and interpreted it means light upon light. And this is a reflection, or a bookend of it. There’s a metaphysical significance; the light that’s transcendent to the world, something that’s kind of pre-eternal. They have this notion, which I guess any of us around the world have this idea in some form - of the Dunya, the everyday world ,can keep us from seeing that kind of light that we can see inside but it’s often hard to see it outside in the world, because of all the distractions.

For me, the artist, it was even cooler because when I put down this layer first it was all the light, the beautiful light colors. When I put the Dunya over it, that kind of messy world, it was still very beautiful but it was kind of chaotic. It masks most of the light, but then the other thing, and this is very prominent in a lot of Islamic mysticism, that in reality it’s that chaos that is there that helps us see what it [the light] is by it’s contrast. If it were all one field all you would have seen was the light. If you have something that gives it contrast, you can really understand the nature of this light. By contrast to something else. So it’s kind of playing out that image, with the symbolism that is being expressed in the words, the language and what is behind them.

And that’s an ancient belief in this art form?

Yeah.

So you’re embracing some of the philosophy of Ebru?

Yes. And sometimes the relationship that I have with these images helps me to understand it even better. They’re almost like little textbooks in some ways. There’s a great guy, Al-Hallaj, he lived in the 1100’s or so, and he was this amazing revolutionary kind of mystic. He was outspoken, and didn’t make too many friends in high places, and they ended up chopping him up and doing terrible things to him. He has this one book that has all this imagery in it. I want to do a series of that because I think it would be so cool to work with those images. And once again, because of that relationship that happens with the images as I’m working with them. It would also be an opportunity to bring some of that to us, to our culture. To make it accessible. That’s another series that will probably start in the fall.

I had a lot of fun making Wahid because I love the Hubble telescope and the pictures that it’s sending back. And this one’s called Wahid which means that there only is one of, or unique. So you know that light lines that you see in Hubble photographs, you can do that by shifting the paper. I did this whole thing of making something that looks like these hallucinatory things they see out there in space. And then there’s this uniqueness floating in the middle of that.

So these characters can be assembled in the form of a structured, formal language?

They are a formal language, Arabic mostly, but there’s different ways they can be used. Some are just made for the beauty of the written language. But as you can see they can be used as ornamentation and made to represent things like animals. One of the drives of this is that in Islam, you aren’t supposed to create images of people, like in Buddhism how Buddha requested that people not make images of him. The idea being that there’s something that’s more abstract and formless to focus on. But I think that the artist’s soul always wants to have something in front of us of beauty. It’s kind of taken this turn, turned into all of this [ Eastern Calligraphic Art]. It’s kind of like you can’t contain it. And then you come full circle, and you can see actual human figures made out of these characters.

 You refer to your pieces as prints, but they are originals?

They are originals, they’re monoprints, each unique. But I’m in the process of making limited editions digital prints of some of my works. I got some made across the river, they’re expensive but it’s worth it. Great quality.

What’s the big difference between Turkish vs. Western Abstract Ebru?

With the Western abstraction, it’s much more freed up and broad reaching. In the Turkish method, there really are certain manners in which you do things. If you look in the backgrounds of some of my pieces, these are very traditional patterns.

People say ‘that’s the traditional way.’ But it occurs to me that there must be a time in history when that was revolutionary, and then over time it becomes viewed as the only way you can do things.

I integrate both East and West in some of the works. Gustov Dore did these drawings for the divine comedy. There’s one that is this beautiful image that has this center of light with all thee angels flying around it, The Empyrean. This was the inspiration for Bismallah. I was taking a traditional Western image and incorporate Ebru imagery. Bismallah means “In the name of Allah.” So in this piece I had the abstract inference of the angels swirling around that name, the underlying inspiration from Dore . Instead of trying to make myself into a Turk, I’m coming to this from where I am.

I guess some of the difference in my work from the Eastern Tradition is that I’m much freer with my use of the techniques. Allah Karim is very traditional, and was a tribute to my teacher. You can see how constrained everything is as opposed to some of these other ones. In this I was wanting to appreciate my teacher and what he had taught me.

Can you tell me a little about how you learned the technique?

What was fortunate for me was that I spent most of my adult life in Boston, and Feridun lives in East Boston. At that time when I met him, his wife Nan was teaching at Harvard, he was a former engineer, but the arts were always calling to him. He’s a musician and also an instrument maker. I met him because I was learning some traditional Turkish music. Mainly what I learned from him was not to get stuck in the notion that we have to be one set role. I saw him work [at Ebru] once and was totally intimidated by the magnificence of his work. I thought this work was so cool.

I met my other teacher when I brought over a bunch of Turkish musicians. I was very interested in music for healing, using pentatonic music. There were these guys who was traveling all around central Asia finding very old music. I wanted to bring their group over to Boston, and they brought Hikmet with them. And it turned out these people weren’t very interesting to me, even though their music was interesting. But Hikmet was really interesting and I did Ebru for the first time with him.

Since then Feridun has been my teacher, in a very flexible way. I don’t think he’s ever stood over me and said “do this.” I watched him work and then I work, and I bring it to him and he critiques. I guess it’s like being an apprentice rather than being in an art class. It’s an old way.

It’s a very different relationship to learning, and I think it’s a wonderful way to learn. I supposed it wouldn’t work if there wasn’t someone you resonated with. When I started doing the multi-layer stuff, which is what my teacher specializes in, somehow my life really changed. I remember when I told him and I showed him what I was doing, our relationship changed too. One of the first things he said to me was “are you losing sleep yet?” and I said I was, and he said, “Good.”

Feridun’s teacher, who lives in Turkey, is also a master musician, and a master at Ebru. And he learned from one of the Turkish masters of Ebru. He’s also an instrument maker and is a Neyzen - he plays the reed flute, and he raises roses and finches. I mean, what a life. He came to a show at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, and I was immediately in love with this guy. He was 88 years old. And I was watching everybody else who was having that experience, that everybody who came in contact with him would just melt. He has some art of humanity to him. So there’s a lot going on in this kind of student teacher relationship, this heightened form that was developed in the East.

You can compare to the history of when this art form came to Europe, it went into the guilds. It just became a whole different thing. It became a commercial venture. I’m sure there were people working in a different way, but at the forefront of it, the guild masters would teach each person just one little piece of it, so they couldn’t steal it.

Here in America, you can see the inside covers of expensive books that have the marbling in them. they’re using the same techniques, there is a very different intent, but the process is somewhat similar. There’s a lot of American and German people in particular who are taking this technique and taking it into very extreme and interesting abstractions.

Do you have any other western visual influences?

Nicholas Roerich. His work influenced me in his use of colors - his use of blue. He started in Russia but traveled all around in the East, and spent a lot of time in the foothills of Tibet, in what is now India. He eventually came to America. He tried to start an organization that put this symbol on places like museums and universities, he wanted to have different countries sign a pact that they wouldn’t destroy these buildings having to do with culture in times of war. I think that sense of being able to touch something, and to say something with your art that’s impossible to say with words is so present in his work.

What other parts of Ebru’s philosophy do you feel connected to in your own life?

When I’m working with the process, it’s really so relational with these images. It’s not a cereberal process. I get to access something that’s a little more essential than my intellect and something that’s a little more profound than my emotions. Working out of that inner process of how this thing is going to look, I really cherish being in that state.

There’s also the patience that’s involved. There are so many steps to go through. It reminds me a lot of going through a birth process. When I lived in Massachusetts, we had a whole bunch of little studios that were linked together in one hall. I remember I just finished this piece, and I was really happy about it, and I ran down the hall with it to show another artist, still at work at the other end of the hall. It was three A.M. and we were the only people that were still there. I had this thing in my hands and I came in, and she said ‘how come it’s all wet?’ And I looked at it and though ‘God, this is like a baby. Baby’s are all wet when they come out too.’ There’s this gestational part of it, but when you actually get to doing printing, you’re working with nature, with the fluid and the humidity. I find it to be much more a sense of relating to nature when I’m working in this way than I have in any other art form that I have tried to do.

You do a great job of describing each image on your web site. Is there a particular way that the viewer is supposed to perceive the backgrounds or the marbling beneath the written characters? you described it as light at one point, which I found to be very interesting.

Some of them, there’s definitely an intent for it be seen symbolically. This one is ArRahman Ar Raheem, ‘the mercy and the compassion.’ The layer beneath the characters is these lily pads, which is to show that this mercy and compassion can be found in nature. From a symbolic point of view, there might be something I have done to imbue it with a certain imagery. But in other pieces, I don’t think it’s needed.

I think that for a western audience it can enhance the piece to know what the characters mean.

There’s a feeling of transience in the technique that you use. That feeling of water or a liquid that you’re almost ‘catching’ at the right time, but it’s also contrasted with these characters that you’re using. theres the notion of language or a letter being such an abstraction of the visual that it extends into infinity. Is there a feeling of time that you think is evocative in your work?

I haven’t seen much of that. Although I can think of one comment. A gentlemen came with his wife, who worked in the same studio, and he was looking at an Ebru piece. We were talking about an Italo Calvino book, and time, and reading this book and how absorbing it gets. Then he said ‘or we could just sit here for a while and just look at your artwork…’ and he just got lost in it.

I think that it’s more representational of the timeless world, where the temporal is lost. Even the words themselves are speaking to something that is very often beyond time. I’ve worked very hard to even put a sense of time into some of these, because I feel these are almost windows into a place where time isn’t really so relevant.

In some ways, it’s almost two sides of timelessness. The backgrounds are like flowing water, an organic kind of timelessness with nature and the world going by. The characters are a different kind of timelessness, unchanging and eternal.

That’s what I love about those images. That’s why I like to work with them, because they’re access to something that I feel hungry for. It’s like taking something that’s transcendent, and then mixing in the physical elements that are so present in the medium.

I think there might be something eternal in the calligraphies themselves, but there’s something in the elements that’s relational with that. Maybe that’s the essence of poetry and prayer. There’s something that is totally transcendent and eternal, and then we have a way of touching that and integrating ourselves with it.

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Reza Antoszewska will be showing at Milepost 5 this weekend.  Her work will include prints on fabric and paper, as well as a demonstration of the Ebru technique on Saturday, September 27.