Telegraph | Arts | Hockney and the secrets of the Old Masters: " Hockney and the secrets of the Old Masters
(Filed: 22/09/2001)
Has David Hockney made a discovery that will change the history of art for ever? He talks to Martin Gayford
IN 1999, there was a magnificent exhibition of Ingres portraits at the National Gallery in London. Among the many visitors was David Hockney, and he, along with everyone else, was struck by the extraordinary delicacy and precision of the portrait drawings on show by the French master. Unlike the public - and the art historians and critics - he started to ask himself specific practical questions about those miraculous little works on paper.
As someone who himself had drawn delicate and precise images of people in the tradition that stems from Ingres, he wanted to know how they were done. And the answers he came up with led to other questions and other answers, and finally to a theory, set out in his new book Secret Knowledge, that could revolutionise our understanding of art history.
What Hockney saw when he looked hard at those Ingres drawings were signs that Ingres had been using a piece of optical equipment called a camera lucida. That is, as he puts it, "a prism on a stick". "When you look through the prism from a certain point you can see the person in front of you and the paper below at the same time." In that way, as Hockney explains, a skilled artist could trace the image, "fast-forwarding" through the normal process of measuring the subject's head by eye.
Hockney suggests there are two ways of working from life. One is what used to go on in art schools in front of a model: looking, measuring, groping to find the right line. The second way is to work from an image that is already there - a photograph, a projected slide. Hockney argued that Ingres was working in the second way, using the camera lucida rapidly to establish the key proportions of his sitter's face - which he then worked over more slowly without the optical aid. Then, equally rapidly, he jotted down the lines of their clothes, which he could see apparently hovering above the paper. Thus the use of this tool would explain puzzling features of the Ingres drawings, including the speed at which Ingres had been able to turn them out, and the fact that some lines looked traced.
At the time there was some coverage of this theory. Hockney talked about it, and did a series of drawings using the same technique. Over the last couple of years there have been further hints of how his mind was working - a letter to The Telegraph, for example, suggesting that Constable used an optical aid in painting his studies of clouds. There was a predictable, dismissive response: Hockney was mad, he had a bee in his bonnet. To which the artist calmly replied when we recently spent an evening discussing the subject: "Well, I know something that they don't."
Now, with the publication of this book, he lets the rest of us in on the secret. And his contentions are pretty astounding - not merely that some artists used certain bags of tricks, but that, effectively, the photographic way of looking at the world, through optical equipment, pre-dates, by centuries, the invention of photography itself. "The spirit of photography is much older than its history," said Hockney. "That is what my assistant David Graves and I have discovered." It began, according to the Hockney thesis, not with the discovery in the early 19th century that optical images could be chemically fixed on glass and paper, but in the early 15th century. And it began in just the places where we conventionally consider the Renaissance to have started - in the Flanders of van Eyck and the Florence of Masaccio and Brunelleschi.
"We went to Florence to attend a conference on art and science," Hockney explained. "And we stood on the exact spot that Brunelleschi is supposed to have stood when according to Vasari he made one of the first perspective paintings - of the baptistry from the cathedral. And onto a panel the precise size of his panel, which is described, we projected the baptistry, perfectly though upside down, with a mirror that cost us £6." And from an image such as this, Brunelleschi could have created his painting.
This is the truly startling aspect of Hockney's thesis. It has often been suggested that some artists, Vermeer and Canaletto in particular, might have used optical equipment. But Hockney has rediscovered a simple technique by which artists could have done so from the late Middle Ages on. All that is required is a concave mirror, in everyday terms, a shaving mirror, which we know to have been something that could have been manufactured at the time. Its opposite, a convex mirror - which simply has the silvering on the other side of the glass - is frequently depicted hanging on the wall of early Netherlandish paintings such as Van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait.
"It's very easy to do," Hockney went on. "We made experiments, and we found out how they used mirrors then. Nobody before has ever made these empirical tests - which is shocking in a way." He showed me videotapes of some of those experiments, in which extraordinarily beautiful, shimmering images appeared as if by magic in his Los Angeles studio.
The secret is that a concave mirror has the optical qualities of a lens. It will project an image onto a flat surface. And it will do so vividly if the thing to be projected is brightly illuminated, and the lens and the projection are in a darker space (Hockney experimented by painting a van Eyck-style portrait in this way of someone sitting outside a window).
These optical projections, as he calls them, are fascinating things. Their use would explain many aspects of paintings by masters as diverse as Holbein, Chardin, Caravaggio and Velazquez. The swirling satins, for example, of which 17th-century painters were so fond, are also exactly the kind of effect that optical projections pick out and enhance with hyper-real clarity. In his book he illustrates how the very simple, straightforward depiction of cloth by earlier artists such as Giotto and Pisanello was suddenly transformed into the complex, and technically difficult treatment of folds, patterns and textile texture in 16th- and 17th-century art.
The use of optical devices would explain the almost supernatural accuracy with which Holbein foreshortened the various items on the table in The Ambassadors. And Hockney has detected places where it looks as though artists such as Holbein and Lotto had to shift focus because part of, say, an oriental carpet had gone fuzzy.
Similar problems could explain why the figures in Caravaggio - as people noted at this year's Royal Academy exhibition - are often strangely grouped. Hockney argues that his paintings are, in effect, collages of optical projections done at different times. Small changes of focus or positioning might result in figures being too big, or oddly crammed together in too little space.
"Interestingly, another criticism of Caravaggio," says Hockney, "was that the sacred figures looked like ordinary people. But of course, they would have been ordinary people if he was using optics - just as a photographer would have to use ordinary people. That criticism was very similar to that made against a New Testament movie in the Fifties called The Road. Everybody wanted to know who the actor would be who would play Christ, and about his private life."
By 1600 Hockney believes that the technology had advanced sufficiently for lenses to be used instead of mirrors. Indeed, his theory suggests that the methods of some Old Masters were closer to those of 20th-century film and photographic media than might have been imagined. "I've become most interested in a painter called Cagnacci, whose work I used to walk past. Now I look at it and realise how close to a Hollywood studio his workshop must have been - you know, costumes, lighting, camera, action!"
But what Hockney is not saying is that in some way these Old Masters were cheating. "Well, people say, you shouldn't destroy the mystery. But how it's done is not the deepest mystery. Because in the end nobody knows how it's done - how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can." In fact, what he is suggesting is no more shocking than the use of photography by many later painters such as Sickert, Degas and Bacon.
Nor is he saying that all Old Masters used these techniques. In the book, he draws a diagram showing the interaction of the optical tradition with what he calls eye-balling. The argument is that many painters - Rubens, for example - did not use optical devices, but that even those who didn't were sometimes affected by the optical "look".
In fact, Hockney redraws most of Western art history, because his argument is also that the history of painting since the late 19th century is in part an attempt to escape the lens-eye view of the world. Cezanne, in particular, fought heroically to see the world in a different way - the way a two-eyed, mobile person sees it, rather than the way a fixed, single lens does. And this has been Hockney's own struggle as an artist. In the past he has worked in a near photographically naturalistic idiom, but also experimented with many other modes of representation. His final view is that the Western lens-based view of the world - which is now universally dominant thanks to the media of film and television - has become a trap.
"I'm coming round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world. There isn't anything else. What we call verisimilitude turns out to be the optical projection and its descendants, which is only one way of looking at the world." In other words, we have grown used to looking at the world through the eye of a camera, but there are other ways of seeing.
It's a truly radical view of the visual world. To put it bluntly, if Hockney is right, then a lot of art history, as it has been practised over the last century and more, is going to look a bit stupid.
There will be a tendency in some academic circles to dismiss his theories flatly. But then, art history as it has been practised up to now has been just that - a branch of history. It has derived from the study of documents, not from practical knowledge of what artists did in their studios (a murky subject about which there is little information).
That is Hockney's great strength. "Until now, art historians simply haven't known enough about how pre-photographic cameras and optical projections work. It's not in the nature of historians to make experiments. Scientists make experiments. Historians would say, we don't know Brunelleschi or van Eyck knew about how to do this - which I think is untenable."
Hockney has shown exactly how these optical tools could have been used - by using them himself. And he has turned up some written references, by Leonardo da Vinci, for example, and the 17th-century Dutch writer and patron Constantin Huygens, which seem to refer to the techniques he has rediscovered. "I think," he adds, "it's quite possible for knowledge to be lost."
None the less, his thesis lacks the smoking-gun evidence that some critics will require. On the other hand, a number of distinguished artists and art world figures have remarked to me that they believe Hockney is on to something. Far from being crazy, what he is saying makes lucid sense.
'Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters' by David Hockney is published by Thames & Hudson on Oct 15, price £35. It is available for £30 plus £1.99 postage through Telegraph Books Direct. To order please call 0870 155 7222. 'David Hockney - Secret Knowledge', an 'Omnibus' special, will be shown on BBC2 on Oct 13. Hockney's designs for Strauss's 'Die Frau ohne Schatten' can be seen at the Royal Opera House from Oct 9."
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Telegraph | Arts | Optical allusions
Telegraph | Arts | Optical allusions: "Optical allusions
(Filed: 29/07/2003)
David Hockney's startling claim about the use of mirror lenses by certain Old Masters has sparked an increasingly heated debate. Sebastian Smee reports on a new assault on the artist's controversial views
One of the National Gallery's most extraordinary paintings, Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Arnolfini and His Wife, is at the centre of an increasingly ugly debate between scientists over whether the Flemish artist employed optical projections to help him paint it.
Controversial perspective: David Hockney
The claim was originally made more than two years ago by the artist David Hockney, in a book called Secret Knowledge. The book, which was followed by a BBC documentary and a segment on CBS's 60 Minutes programme in the US, emerged from several years of keen observation and frenetic hypothesising, and prompted a flurry of articles, seminars, conferences and websites.
Of course, art historians had known for a long time that certain Old Masters did use optical devices. Vermeer almost certainly used a camera obscura; Canaletto used lenses; and Ingres carried a camera lucida with him when making his portrait drawings. But, until Hockney and his friend the physicist Charles Falco came along, no one had suggested that a concave mirror might have been used as a lens by the likes of van Eyck as early as the 1420s.
The claim drew dismissals from many art historians, who were unimpressed by Hockney's inability to find conclusive written evidence for the claim. (His explanation was that the knowledge was kept secret by artists, hence the title of his book.) But, since an important part of the claims comes down to optical evidence and to knowledge of the history of lenses, much of the work of rebutting the claims has fallen to experts in the field of optics. And here, in the supposedly cool and calm climes of science, things have been getting shockingly heated.
Leading the anti-Hockney charge has been David Stork, an academic at Stanford University and chief scientist at Ricoh Innovations, who has written several papers attempting to rebut aspects of the Hockney-Falco theory. The most recent (soon to appear in Optics and Photonics News, a journal that has also published Hockney's and Falco's arguments) addresses specifically van Eyck's painting of the Arnolfini wedding.
Stork's efforts have not endeared him to Hockney and Falco. Falco says his papers "are so superficially incorrect that they're useless. Everything he's written has either been wrong or irrelevant or misleading, or all three. After a while, life's just too short."
Stork's paper on the van Eyck hypothesis addresses two main points. In Secret Knowledge, Hockney pointed to the convex mirror depicted in the Arnolfini painting: "If you reverse the silvering, and then turn it around [to produce a concave mirror], that would be all the optical equipment you would need for the meticulous and natural-looking detail in the picture."
Stork's response, hingeing on a lot of impressive-looking formulae, was to calculate the focal length of the mirror depicted by van Eyck and compare it to an estimate of the focal length of the concave mirror he may have used to make his projection.
"These lengths differ by over eight standard deviations," Stork concludes triumphantly, "and thus we must reject the conjecture that the depicted mirror was so used."
Falco's impatient retort has been to say that Hockney was never saying van Eyck used the same mirror depicted in the painting; he was just demonstrating the simplicity of the mechanism. Hockney had also claimed that van Eyck's incredibly detailed-looking chandelier (which reveals no underdrawing) was in "perfect perspective", suggesting to Hockney and Falco the assistance of an optical projection.
Stork, therefore, performs various perspective analyses on the chandelier, basically by extending lines from the image to see if they meet at the horizon. Since they don't, he concludes that the chandelier is not in perfect perspective at all. He even gets a contemporary British painter, Nicholas Williams, to paint a (simpler) chandelier "by eye" alone, and, finding that it is in perfect perspective, concludes "that a skilful artist does not need projections to achieve excellent perspective".
On this point, Falco can barely contain his exasperation. He argues that an image of any complex, handmade chandelier would fail the perspective analyses performed by Stork for the simple reason that any slight imperfection in it would prevent Stork's extended lines from meeting at the horizon. Falco's own, more sophisticated (he says) tests show that indeed van Eyck's perspective is virtually perfect.
One could go on endlessly with such arguments and all their multiple rebuttals. But what becomes most fascinating is the tone of the debate.
"Stork is such a literal-minded person. I wish he would go away," said Falco, who claimed his opponent is simply using the high-profile nature of the debate to get himself known.
Stork, in turn, is highly critical of Falco's perceived arrogance, and irritated by the way the debate is being conducted. "We cannot ignore the immense public-relations advantage of Hockney," he adds. "If the same (or better justified) ideas were put forth by an obscure scholar or brilliant graduate student, no one would pay attention."
Hockney, like Falco, is dismissive of Stork ("I never took him seriously"). But he seems increasingly keen to lift himself above the melée.
"I don't want to get involved with the scientists too much. They tend not to grasp what it is actually about. What they're asking is, 'Is David Hockney right or wrong?', which is a ridiculous way of looking at it."
Hockney's argument about the use of optical devices was part of a wider thesis on photography and its relationship to art. Such questions have been at the centre of his own practice for several decades, as anyone who has seen his inventive photocollages or shifting perspective paintings will know.
Although Hockney claims pictures themselves are his historical documents, ultimately, he is not so interested in making them perform the empiricist function scientists require. Instead, his observations are constantly being fed back into his concerns as a practising artist.
None of which is to deny the significance of his claim about the early use of mirror lenses. The question is important because van Eyck has always represented something of a turning point in art history. He attained a degree of detailed naturalism that seemed a quantum leap ahead of what had preceded them.
The usual explanation for this leap invokes the invention of oil paint, as well as the application of newly discovered rules of perspective. So it's no surprise that Hockney's suggestion that van Eyck had used an optical device came as a shock.
But, when I asked him if his thesis would be demolished if his speculation about van Eyck proved wrong, Hockney said: "No, of course not. To see the optical projection is to use it. You don't need to have traced from it. So the question is when did they first see it? That's a perfectly good question. And what I'm saying is that around 1420 there was a change in painting which had to do with optics. How it happened I can't be sure, but there was."
Stork says he came to Hockney's theory with an open mind. He now disagrees with the claims about van Eyck, but, when asked whether he thought artists might have used optical devices more than we previously realised, his admission seemed to echo what most people secretly think: "This is an interesting question, worthy of further analysis."
For publishers wishing to reproduce photographs on this page please phone 44 (0) 207 538 7505 or email syndicat@telegraph.co.uk"
(Filed: 29/07/2003)
 |
| Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Arnolfini and His Wife |
One of the National Gallery's most extraordinary paintings, Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Arnolfini and His Wife, is at the centre of an increasingly ugly debate between scientists over whether the Flemish artist employed optical projections to help him paint it.
Controversial perspective: David Hockney
The claim was originally made more than two years ago by the artist David Hockney, in a book called Secret Knowledge. The book, which was followed by a BBC documentary and a segment on CBS's 60 Minutes programme in the US, emerged from several years of keen observation and frenetic hypothesising, and prompted a flurry of articles, seminars, conferences and websites.
Of course, art historians had known for a long time that certain Old Masters did use optical devices. Vermeer almost certainly used a camera obscura; Canaletto used lenses; and Ingres carried a camera lucida with him when making his portrait drawings. But, until Hockney and his friend the physicist Charles Falco came along, no one had suggested that a concave mirror might have been used as a lens by the likes of van Eyck as early as the 1420s.
The claim drew dismissals from many art historians, who were unimpressed by Hockney's inability to find conclusive written evidence for the claim. (His explanation was that the knowledge was kept secret by artists, hence the title of his book.) But, since an important part of the claims comes down to optical evidence and to knowledge of the history of lenses, much of the work of rebutting the claims has fallen to experts in the field of optics. And here, in the supposedly cool and calm climes of science, things have been getting shockingly heated.
Leading the anti-Hockney charge has been David Stork, an academic at Stanford University and chief scientist at Ricoh Innovations, who has written several papers attempting to rebut aspects of the Hockney-Falco theory. The most recent (soon to appear in Optics and Photonics News, a journal that has also published Hockney's and Falco's arguments) addresses specifically van Eyck's painting of the Arnolfini wedding.
Stork's efforts have not endeared him to Hockney and Falco. Falco says his papers "are so superficially incorrect that they're useless. Everything he's written has either been wrong or irrelevant or misleading, or all three. After a while, life's just too short."
Stork's paper on the van Eyck hypothesis addresses two main points. In Secret Knowledge, Hockney pointed to the convex mirror depicted in the Arnolfini painting: "If you reverse the silvering, and then turn it around [to produce a concave mirror], that would be all the optical equipment you would need for the meticulous and natural-looking detail in the picture."
Stork's response, hingeing on a lot of impressive-looking formulae, was to calculate the focal length of the mirror depicted by van Eyck and compare it to an estimate of the focal length of the concave mirror he may have used to make his projection.
"These lengths differ by over eight standard deviations," Stork concludes triumphantly, "and thus we must reject the conjecture that the depicted mirror was so used."
Falco's impatient retort has been to say that Hockney was never saying van Eyck used the same mirror depicted in the painting; he was just demonstrating the simplicity of the mechanism. Hockney had also claimed that van Eyck's incredibly detailed-looking chandelier (which reveals no underdrawing) was in "perfect perspective", suggesting to Hockney and Falco the assistance of an optical projection.
Stork, therefore, performs various perspective analyses on the chandelier, basically by extending lines from the image to see if they meet at the horizon. Since they don't, he concludes that the chandelier is not in perfect perspective at all. He even gets a contemporary British painter, Nicholas Williams, to paint a (simpler) chandelier "by eye" alone, and, finding that it is in perfect perspective, concludes "that a skilful artist does not need projections to achieve excellent perspective".
On this point, Falco can barely contain his exasperation. He argues that an image of any complex, handmade chandelier would fail the perspective analyses performed by Stork for the simple reason that any slight imperfection in it would prevent Stork's extended lines from meeting at the horizon. Falco's own, more sophisticated (he says) tests show that indeed van Eyck's perspective is virtually perfect.
One could go on endlessly with such arguments and all their multiple rebuttals. But what becomes most fascinating is the tone of the debate.
"Stork is such a literal-minded person. I wish he would go away," said Falco, who claimed his opponent is simply using the high-profile nature of the debate to get himself known.
Stork, in turn, is highly critical of Falco's perceived arrogance, and irritated by the way the debate is being conducted. "We cannot ignore the immense public-relations advantage of Hockney," he adds. "If the same (or better justified) ideas were put forth by an obscure scholar or brilliant graduate student, no one would pay attention."
Hockney, like Falco, is dismissive of Stork ("I never took him seriously"). But he seems increasingly keen to lift himself above the melée.
"I don't want to get involved with the scientists too much. They tend not to grasp what it is actually about. What they're asking is, 'Is David Hockney right or wrong?', which is a ridiculous way of looking at it."
Hockney's argument about the use of optical devices was part of a wider thesis on photography and its relationship to art. Such questions have been at the centre of his own practice for several decades, as anyone who has seen his inventive photocollages or shifting perspective paintings will know.
Although Hockney claims pictures themselves are his historical documents, ultimately, he is not so interested in making them perform the empiricist function scientists require. Instead, his observations are constantly being fed back into his concerns as a practising artist.
None of which is to deny the significance of his claim about the early use of mirror lenses. The question is important because van Eyck has always represented something of a turning point in art history. He attained a degree of detailed naturalism that seemed a quantum leap ahead of what had preceded them.
The usual explanation for this leap invokes the invention of oil paint, as well as the application of newly discovered rules of perspective. So it's no surprise that Hockney's suggestion that van Eyck had used an optical device came as a shock.
But, when I asked him if his thesis would be demolished if his speculation about van Eyck proved wrong, Hockney said: "No, of course not. To see the optical projection is to use it. You don't need to have traced from it. So the question is when did they first see it? That's a perfectly good question. And what I'm saying is that around 1420 there was a change in painting which had to do with optics. How it happened I can't be sure, but there was."
Stork says he came to Hockney's theory with an open mind. He now disagrees with the claims about van Eyck, but, when asked whether he thought artists might have used optical devices more than we previously realised, his admission seemed to echo what most people secretly think: "This is an interesting question, worthy of further analysis."
For publishers wishing to reproduce photographs on this page please phone 44 (0) 207 538 7505 or email syndicat@telegraph.co.uk"
Saturday, February 04, 2006
The Tribune, Chandigarh, India - Bini Malcolm Magical carpets
The Tribune, Chandigarh, India - Education Tribune: "Magical carpets
Vimla Patil
FOR more than 40 years, Bini Malcolm has been fascinated by rug and carpet designs. She has travelled for decades through Central Asian and oriental countries to trace the origins of weaves and designs. "My husband John and I lived in Iran for five years, sharing our lives with tribals in hilly areas, deserts and lush forests of this exotic country. We travelled to innumerable Turkish villages, Samarkand, Bokhara, Kazakhstan, Turkemenistan and Kirgizistan. We studied museum pieces and photographed tribal villages and workshops, carpets and rugs in mosques, palaces and in the marketplace.
"Today, I have enough knowledge to call myself an oriental carpet scholar and researcher. I am also a collector of rugs. From Australia, I work as an international consultant on purchasing, maintaining and evaluating carpets and rugs. I have a great deal of data on the history of carpets and rugs and using this, I give lectures and presentations to interested groups all over the world."
Bini’s journeys have taken her into the heart of history. "The art of weaving carpets has been one of earliest accomplishments of oriental civilisations," she says, "Iran, Iraq, Baluchistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Kazakstan, India, Pakistan – particularly Kashmir – have been known for thousands of years for famous carpets and rugs made by highly skilled craftspersons. One of the earliest carpets known to the modern world – more than 2500 years old – was discovered in the eastern region of the former USSR, where excavations included mummies, frozen animals and other objects wrapped in beautifully woven carpets. Though ice and rocky soil had ruined parts of it, the motifs, woven in pure wool dyed in vegetable dyes, are intact. This carpet is now in the British Museum for all to see. Some of the world’s most famous museums in the West have fabulous examples of carpets and rugs woven all over the world through the past millennia. I would say that the weaving of carpets and their diversity has been one of mankind’s highest achievements."
Bini classifies rugs and carpets into three categories. The most common among these are tribal rugs which are of diverse designs and are woven by tribes that live in the belt stretching from the Himalayas to the Central Asian mountain ranges. These are made with wool harvested by the tribes from their sheep, coloured with vegetable dyes and are chiefly used in homes and camps during winter months. Some carpet weaves and designs thus reappear on coats and wraps and women’s knee-length coats too. Tribal rugs – which are primitive in design – are made for family use, wedding presents or for covering camels and horses when their caravans move from place to place.
The second variety is called ‘village carpets’. They are woven during the winter months when tribes or craftspersons stay put in their homes. They are made in larger numbers and offered for sale in village or city markets.
The last variety is the ‘heirloom carpet’, woven in prime wool or silk and made by experts for the use of royalty or very rich people in most countries. This variety also includes the specially woven Mosque carpets in the favourite colour of the Prophet, namely green; and prayer rugs that are seen in famous mosques and durgahs.
The northern regions of India and Pakistan – mainly Kashmir – have a fabulous heritage of making carpets and rugs. In several centres in this region, the world’s finest carpets are woven and exported to the West. With the Central Asian countries losing their market share because of wars, fundamentalism and terrorism, India has gained and is probably the biggest producer of carpets and rugs in the world today. Indian and Pakistani carpets are fetching huge prices in the world markets because of the expert craftsmanship and world-class production values. The price and value of a carpet depends upon the quality of wool, vegetable dyes used and the maintenance requirements. Most experts advise that carpets should be washed and cleaned thoroughly at least twice a year.
"Carpet motifs are interesting," says Bini, "They usually reveal their heritage. In Central Asia, though the tribal weavers are Muslims, they traditionally use birds, animals and even human figures with floral shapes. With cross-cultural influences, the lotus, the swan, the tree of life and the paisley from India are found in carpets all over these regions. Most varieties have geometrical motifs. Other carpets reflect the vastness of deserts and barren mountain ranges. Interestingly, Kashmiri carpets mirror the fabulous Moghul garden concepts – the charbaug, the square garden with water pools, the hexagonal flower beds with paths dividing them – all these are used in a symmetrical manner in rugs and carpets. Some of the world’s best carpets have appreciated fabulously. One small rug that I bought in an Iranian village for `A350 in the 1970s has been evaluated at `A35000 today."
Bini gives credit to religious foundations, libraries and mosques in Central Asian countries for preserving the finest examples of carpets and rugs. "Many owners have given priceless heritage objects to them for safe-keeping during riots and bloody wars and they have looked after them with pride and care. The heritage they have saved has enriched the world’s artistic treasure fabulously.""
Vimla Patil
FOR more than 40 years, Bini Malcolm has been fascinated by rug and carpet designs. She has travelled for decades through Central Asian and oriental countries to trace the origins of weaves and designs. "My husband John and I lived in Iran for five years, sharing our lives with tribals in hilly areas, deserts and lush forests of this exotic country. We travelled to innumerable Turkish villages, Samarkand, Bokhara, Kazakhstan, Turkemenistan and Kirgizistan. We studied museum pieces and photographed tribal villages and workshops, carpets and rugs in mosques, palaces and in the marketplace.
"Today, I have enough knowledge to call myself an oriental carpet scholar and researcher. I am also a collector of rugs. From Australia, I work as an international consultant on purchasing, maintaining and evaluating carpets and rugs. I have a great deal of data on the history of carpets and rugs and using this, I give lectures and presentations to interested groups all over the world."
Bini’s journeys have taken her into the heart of history. "The art of weaving carpets has been one of earliest accomplishments of oriental civilisations," she says, "Iran, Iraq, Baluchistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Kazakstan, India, Pakistan – particularly Kashmir – have been known for thousands of years for famous carpets and rugs made by highly skilled craftspersons. One of the earliest carpets known to the modern world – more than 2500 years old – was discovered in the eastern region of the former USSR, where excavations included mummies, frozen animals and other objects wrapped in beautifully woven carpets. Though ice and rocky soil had ruined parts of it, the motifs, woven in pure wool dyed in vegetable dyes, are intact. This carpet is now in the British Museum for all to see. Some of the world’s most famous museums in the West have fabulous examples of carpets and rugs woven all over the world through the past millennia. I would say that the weaving of carpets and their diversity has been one of mankind’s highest achievements."
Bini classifies rugs and carpets into three categories. The most common among these are tribal rugs which are of diverse designs and are woven by tribes that live in the belt stretching from the Himalayas to the Central Asian mountain ranges. These are made with wool harvested by the tribes from their sheep, coloured with vegetable dyes and are chiefly used in homes and camps during winter months. Some carpet weaves and designs thus reappear on coats and wraps and women’s knee-length coats too. Tribal rugs – which are primitive in design – are made for family use, wedding presents or for covering camels and horses when their caravans move from place to place.
The second variety is called ‘village carpets’. They are woven during the winter months when tribes or craftspersons stay put in their homes. They are made in larger numbers and offered for sale in village or city markets.
The last variety is the ‘heirloom carpet’, woven in prime wool or silk and made by experts for the use of royalty or very rich people in most countries. This variety also includes the specially woven Mosque carpets in the favourite colour of the Prophet, namely green; and prayer rugs that are seen in famous mosques and durgahs.
The northern regions of India and Pakistan – mainly Kashmir – have a fabulous heritage of making carpets and rugs. In several centres in this region, the world’s finest carpets are woven and exported to the West. With the Central Asian countries losing their market share because of wars, fundamentalism and terrorism, India has gained and is probably the biggest producer of carpets and rugs in the world today. Indian and Pakistani carpets are fetching huge prices in the world markets because of the expert craftsmanship and world-class production values. The price and value of a carpet depends upon the quality of wool, vegetable dyes used and the maintenance requirements. Most experts advise that carpets should be washed and cleaned thoroughly at least twice a year.
"Carpet motifs are interesting," says Bini, "They usually reveal their heritage. In Central Asia, though the tribal weavers are Muslims, they traditionally use birds, animals and even human figures with floral shapes. With cross-cultural influences, the lotus, the swan, the tree of life and the paisley from India are found in carpets all over these regions. Most varieties have geometrical motifs. Other carpets reflect the vastness of deserts and barren mountain ranges. Interestingly, Kashmiri carpets mirror the fabulous Moghul garden concepts – the charbaug, the square garden with water pools, the hexagonal flower beds with paths dividing them – all these are used in a symmetrical manner in rugs and carpets. Some of the world’s best carpets have appreciated fabulously. One small rug that I bought in an Iranian village for `A350 in the 1970s has been evaluated at `A35000 today."
Bini gives credit to religious foundations, libraries and mosques in Central Asian countries for preserving the finest examples of carpets and rugs. "Many owners have given priceless heritage objects to them for safe-keeping during riots and bloody wars and they have looked after them with pride and care. The heritage they have saved has enriched the world’s artistic treasure fabulously.""
George Jevremovic's Magic carpet ride
Magic carpet ride: "Magic carpet ride
Eils Lotozo
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Feb. 18, 2005 12:00 AM
PHILADELPHIA - George Jevremovic didn't set out to become the savior of the Oriental rug trade.
He wanted to be a writer until he followed his college girlfriend to her native Turkey in 1979, caught what he calls "the rug bug," and began scouring the country for Oriental rugs to sell to dealers and collectors.
At first, Jevremovic (pronounced Yev-REM-o-vitch), who traveled back and forth between Turkey and the United States, traded strictly in antiques. That's because new hand-woven rugs were sorry specimens. Their quality had been declining since the 1920s, when machine-spun yarn replaced handspun materials, and chemical dyes took the place of plant-based colors. By the time Jevremovic came on the scene, dealers could find few new rugs of quality. advertisement
Then, in 1981, he spied a small, luminously colored carpet in an Istanbul bazaar. "It stopped me dead in my tracks, and it wasn't an antique," he says.
The rug, he discovered, was a product of a Turkish government program, known by the acronym DOBAG, aimed at reviving traditional weaving practices. The carpet's color came from the efforts of a German chemist named Harald Bohmer. He'd been hired to re-create the long-lost recipes for natural dyes "whose rich hues once made Turkish rugs treasures."
In the bazaar, Jevremovic was gripped by an idea he'd never considered before: Perhaps it was possible to make new rugs that had the same qualities as old ones.
Over the last two decades, his Philadelphia company, Woven Legends, has turned that epiphany into an industry. The company now employs close to 10,000 people in Turkey.
At least 4,000 wash and hand-spin into yarn the 200 tons of raw wool the company uses each year. Between 4,000 and 5,000 hand-weavers work in studios Jevremovic and his business partner (and former wife) Neslihan have set up in 150 villages in Turkey. The women (in Turkish tradition, most weavers are young, unmarried females) produce the equivalent of 400 9-by-12 rugs each month.
Besides boosting the economy of rural Turkey, Woven Legends' lush designs and age-old techniques jump-started a worldwide renaissance for modern carpet weaving and helped bring new Oriental rugs into favor again.
"By going back to ancient standards, George helped to rebuild a whole industry," says James Opie, a rug expert and dealer in Portland, Ore.
"He's perfected the art of making new rugs that genuinely look like antiques and are in all respects equal to antiques," says Emmett Eiland, a Berkeley, Calif., rug dealer and author of the book "Oriental Rugs Today.
It was a hard-won achievement, one that has meant near constant travel for the Chestnut Hill resident, including trips to Agra, India, where the company employs 1,500 rugmakers, and to northern China, where Woven Legends hopes to replicate its Turkish operation. This, in between his trips to Turkey every six weeks.
There, he works on color recipes at the dyeing facility in Malatya and new designs with his team of 25 designers, and makes the rounds of the weaving studios, scattered in far-flung villages where telephones are few and e-mail doesn't exist.
"I am in a permanent state of jet lag," says the tall, handsome Jevremovic, 48, in a recent interview at his Philadelphia headquarters. Once an assembly plant for the Atwater Kent radio company, the 70,000-square-foot facility houses both the rug operation and the cavernous Material Culture store, another Jevremovic enterprise, which sells the rugs as well as furniture and decorative objects from around the world.
When the Jevremovics, who met as students at Alfred University in New York state and have an 18-year-old son, launched their venture in Turkey, no infrastructure for large-scale rugmaking existed. So they started from scratch, from persuading skeptical provincial governors to let them set up weaving studios in empty public buildings, to constructing looms big enough for the room-size rugs favored by Europeans and Americans.
They needed to find nomadic sheep herders to provide the raw wool and develop growers for plants such as indigo (used for blue dye) and madder root (for red) no longer being raised as commercial crops.
In some of the villages where weaving traditions had virtually died out, they taught the women how to make rugs. Since then, a corps of students has become teachers, who now supervise the studios. (The experienced weavers' elevated role permits them to work even though they are married.)
Two women sitting at a loom can take eight months to complete the typical rug. Paid by the knot, skilled weavers can earn as much as $200 a month. That might seem modest, but it's a substantial sum in a Turkish village, says Neslihan Jevremovic, 49, who grew up in Istanbul. A 9-by-12 Woven Legends rug can fetch $3,200 to $8,000.
Though child labor remains an issue in rug-producing countries such as Pakistan, India and Nepal, it does not exist in Turkey, where schooling is compulsory.
"I see what we've created as a gain for Turkish women," says Neslihan. "Now, they are not married off at 12 or 14 because they are no longer a mouth to feed."
Woven Legends has also stirred up the rug world with its designs. It offers 11 lines, each of which can include a dozen different rugs and range from the minimalist Aktulu, with its broad bands and blocks of bright color, to the elaborate Persian-tile-like patterns of its Euphrates series.
"Their rugs represent the history of Oriental rugs for the last 300 years," says interior designer Pamela Hughes, who has commissioned 500 custom rugs from Woven Legends for a luxury resort.
"I'm playing with some of their colors and designs with George's guidance," says Hughes, whose clients include the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Sarasota and Philadelphia's Four Seasons Hotel. "He knows more about rugs than anyone I've ever met, and I never go against his judgment."
Among Woven Legends' best-known designs is its brisk-selling "fish rug," whose sea and stream creatures swim against a striking blue-green background. Like most of the company's designs, the original idea came from George Jevremovic and was tweaked by his design team, which creates graph-paper illustrations that become the patterns the weavers follow.
Another innovation is Woven Legends' Azeri Folklife carpets, which feature lively, whimsical scenes of village life. The rugs, produced throughout the 1990s, grew out of his frustration with how little historical information exists about the weavers of Oriental rugs, traditionally named for market towns.
Jevremovic sent a letter to his weavers inviting them to "make a picture of your life"; the result was one-of-a-kind carpets that offer glimpses of the weaver's lives: farming scenes, weddings, a house with a TV antenna. One weaver included a windmill seen on a postcard from an immigrant relative.
Most of Woven Legends' designs, though, are based on patterns Jevremovic finds in old rugs. The kaleidoscopic patterns of the newest line, the Sardis, was inspired by a 15th-century Mamluk rug housed in a museum in Vienna.
Such cross-cultural borrowings have always been a part of the tradition of rug weaving, Jevremovic says. Chinese motifs turn up in 14th-century carpets in central Anatolia, Spanish weavers adapted Turkish designs in the 13th century, and everyone copied the glorious patterns of the Persians.
"All of traditional design I see as sheet music," he says. "They were designs that were brilliant, and they deserve to be reinterpreted and brought back to life."
ONLINE: wovenlegends.com"
For the Best in Oriental Rug Cleaning in the State College and Williamsport Pa area visit Doug's Rug Spa
Eils Lotozo
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Feb. 18, 2005 12:00 AM
PHILADELPHIA - George Jevremovic didn't set out to become the savior of the Oriental rug trade.
He wanted to be a writer until he followed his college girlfriend to her native Turkey in 1979, caught what he calls "the rug bug," and began scouring the country for Oriental rugs to sell to dealers and collectors.
At first, Jevremovic (pronounced Yev-REM-o-vitch), who traveled back and forth between Turkey and the United States, traded strictly in antiques. That's because new hand-woven rugs were sorry specimens. Their quality had been declining since the 1920s, when machine-spun yarn replaced handspun materials, and chemical dyes took the place of plant-based colors. By the time Jevremovic came on the scene, dealers could find few new rugs of quality. advertisement
Then, in 1981, he spied a small, luminously colored carpet in an Istanbul bazaar. "It stopped me dead in my tracks, and it wasn't an antique," he says.
The rug, he discovered, was a product of a Turkish government program, known by the acronym DOBAG, aimed at reviving traditional weaving practices. The carpet's color came from the efforts of a German chemist named Harald Bohmer. He'd been hired to re-create the long-lost recipes for natural dyes "whose rich hues once made Turkish rugs treasures."
In the bazaar, Jevremovic was gripped by an idea he'd never considered before: Perhaps it was possible to make new rugs that had the same qualities as old ones.
Over the last two decades, his Philadelphia company, Woven Legends, has turned that epiphany into an industry. The company now employs close to 10,000 people in Turkey.
At least 4,000 wash and hand-spin into yarn the 200 tons of raw wool the company uses each year. Between 4,000 and 5,000 hand-weavers work in studios Jevremovic and his business partner (and former wife) Neslihan have set up in 150 villages in Turkey. The women (in Turkish tradition, most weavers are young, unmarried females) produce the equivalent of 400 9-by-12 rugs each month.
Besides boosting the economy of rural Turkey, Woven Legends' lush designs and age-old techniques jump-started a worldwide renaissance for modern carpet weaving and helped bring new Oriental rugs into favor again.
"By going back to ancient standards, George helped to rebuild a whole industry," says James Opie, a rug expert and dealer in Portland, Ore.
"He's perfected the art of making new rugs that genuinely look like antiques and are in all respects equal to antiques," says Emmett Eiland, a Berkeley, Calif., rug dealer and author of the book "Oriental Rugs Today.
It was a hard-won achievement, one that has meant near constant travel for the Chestnut Hill resident, including trips to Agra, India, where the company employs 1,500 rugmakers, and to northern China, where Woven Legends hopes to replicate its Turkish operation. This, in between his trips to Turkey every six weeks.
There, he works on color recipes at the dyeing facility in Malatya and new designs with his team of 25 designers, and makes the rounds of the weaving studios, scattered in far-flung villages where telephones are few and e-mail doesn't exist.
"I am in a permanent state of jet lag," says the tall, handsome Jevremovic, 48, in a recent interview at his Philadelphia headquarters. Once an assembly plant for the Atwater Kent radio company, the 70,000-square-foot facility houses both the rug operation and the cavernous Material Culture store, another Jevremovic enterprise, which sells the rugs as well as furniture and decorative objects from around the world.
When the Jevremovics, who met as students at Alfred University in New York state and have an 18-year-old son, launched their venture in Turkey, no infrastructure for large-scale rugmaking existed. So they started from scratch, from persuading skeptical provincial governors to let them set up weaving studios in empty public buildings, to constructing looms big enough for the room-size rugs favored by Europeans and Americans.
They needed to find nomadic sheep herders to provide the raw wool and develop growers for plants such as indigo (used for blue dye) and madder root (for red) no longer being raised as commercial crops.
In some of the villages where weaving traditions had virtually died out, they taught the women how to make rugs. Since then, a corps of students has become teachers, who now supervise the studios. (The experienced weavers' elevated role permits them to work even though they are married.)
Two women sitting at a loom can take eight months to complete the typical rug. Paid by the knot, skilled weavers can earn as much as $200 a month. That might seem modest, but it's a substantial sum in a Turkish village, says Neslihan Jevremovic, 49, who grew up in Istanbul. A 9-by-12 Woven Legends rug can fetch $3,200 to $8,000.
Though child labor remains an issue in rug-producing countries such as Pakistan, India and Nepal, it does not exist in Turkey, where schooling is compulsory.
"I see what we've created as a gain for Turkish women," says Neslihan. "Now, they are not married off at 12 or 14 because they are no longer a mouth to feed."
Woven Legends has also stirred up the rug world with its designs. It offers 11 lines, each of which can include a dozen different rugs and range from the minimalist Aktulu, with its broad bands and blocks of bright color, to the elaborate Persian-tile-like patterns of its Euphrates series.
"Their rugs represent the history of Oriental rugs for the last 300 years," says interior designer Pamela Hughes, who has commissioned 500 custom rugs from Woven Legends for a luxury resort.
"I'm playing with some of their colors and designs with George's guidance," says Hughes, whose clients include the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Sarasota and Philadelphia's Four Seasons Hotel. "He knows more about rugs than anyone I've ever met, and I never go against his judgment."
Among Woven Legends' best-known designs is its brisk-selling "fish rug," whose sea and stream creatures swim against a striking blue-green background. Like most of the company's designs, the original idea came from George Jevremovic and was tweaked by his design team, which creates graph-paper illustrations that become the patterns the weavers follow.
Another innovation is Woven Legends' Azeri Folklife carpets, which feature lively, whimsical scenes of village life. The rugs, produced throughout the 1990s, grew out of his frustration with how little historical information exists about the weavers of Oriental rugs, traditionally named for market towns.
Jevremovic sent a letter to his weavers inviting them to "make a picture of your life"; the result was one-of-a-kind carpets that offer glimpses of the weaver's lives: farming scenes, weddings, a house with a TV antenna. One weaver included a windmill seen on a postcard from an immigrant relative.
Most of Woven Legends' designs, though, are based on patterns Jevremovic finds in old rugs. The kaleidoscopic patterns of the newest line, the Sardis, was inspired by a 15th-century Mamluk rug housed in a museum in Vienna.
Such cross-cultural borrowings have always been a part of the tradition of rug weaving, Jevremovic says. Chinese motifs turn up in 14th-century carpets in central Anatolia, Spanish weavers adapted Turkish designs in the 13th century, and everyone copied the glorious patterns of the Persians.
"All of traditional design I see as sheet music," he says. "They were designs that were brilliant, and they deserve to be reinterpreted and brought back to life."
ONLINE: wovenlegends.com"
For the Best in Oriental Rug Cleaning in the State College and Williamsport Pa area visit Doug's Rug Spa
Thursday, February 02, 2006
TIGHTER KNOT BETWEEN CARPET INDUSTRY AND RUGMARK
Untitled Document: "TIGHTER KNOT BETWEEN CARPET INDUSTRY AND RUGMARK
REDUCES CHILD LABOR
Washington D.C.: Four rug companies recently committed to increased social standards and production transparency through membership in the nonprofit RUGMARK. A+ Designs, Amy Helfand, DuncanArts, and Mat the Basics have signed on to be licensees of RUGMARK, an inspection and certification program that verifies illegal child labor is not used and creates educational opportunities for children in the weaving communities of India, Nepal and Pakistan.
RUGMARK’s innovative monitoring system enables both importers and retailers to sell their hand-woven rugs, confident that the product’s integrity was not compromised by child exploitation. Last year, the sale of RUGMARK-certified carpets experienced 20% growth, indicating that the market is a viable mechanism for sustainable social change in South Asia. This most recent increase in collaboration between the carpet industry and RUGMARK underscores this growing trend.
When experienced artist Amy Helfand began to transition her abstract landscape collages into contemporary wool rugs, she explored RUGMARK out of her concern that children might be exploited during the weaving. “When I was looking for a manufacturer to translate my artwork into a rug, I contacted RUGMARK for a list of companies who had pledged not to use child labor,” she explains. “As I began to make more rugs, it only made sense to become a RUGMARK licensee so that my business would reflect a philosophy of integrity.”
A+ Designs owner Alicia Keshishian is among the growing list of RUGMARK licensees whose intent is to raise industry labor standards. Her passion for color and texture was inherited from her own family of accomplished artists. Keshishian was motivated to join RUGMARK as a way to give back to Nepali weaving families. “I deeply respect what skills and talent the weavers offer,” she states. “I want to further support the people that make my dream a reality.” This support is critically needed since reports from groups like UNICEF, the ILO and the U.S. Department of Labor indicate as many as 300,000 children currently work on South Asian rug looms.
Claire Duncan, of the husband and wife creative team DuncanArts, recently brought a love for contemporary design into the traditional media of hand-knotted Tibetan carpets. Having witnessed child labor while in India years ago, Duncan was sensitized to the issue and concerned about finding credible manufacturers. “The moment we learned of the existence of RUGMARK, we experienced a feeling of having come home.” Duncan not only feels relieved, but optimistic that her affiliation with RUGMARK will foster the growth of their young business.
Established companies have also looked to RUGMARK for the assurance that human rights guidelines have been implemented throughout their supply chain. Although fairly new to the U.S. market, Mat the Basics has been weaving handmade rugs in India for over 60 years. Mat the Basics rugs are known for clean lines and rich textures. The company has long been committed to workers rights in Indian weaving communities, including appropriating a just wage and vowing to be child labor-free. This pledge is reflected each time a RUGMARK-certified carpet is sold in their showroom as a portion of the proceeds goes directly toward sending former carpet children to RUGMARK-sponsored schools.
Advances in RUGMARK’s strategy both within the marketplace and weaving communities have allowed the organization to set its sights even higher. In early 2006, RUGMARK will launch a consumer education campaign with a focused effort to substantially increase the market share of RUGMARK certified rugs. With a growing alliance of designers and importers leading the way, RUGMARK believes eliminating illegal child labor in the carpet industry is within reach.
####
RUGMARK is a nonprofit organization working to end illegal child labor in the carpet industry and offer educational opportunities to children in India, Nepal and Pakistan. The RUGMARK label offers the best assurance that no illegal child labor was used in the manufacture of a carpet or rug. To date, over 3,000 children have been freed from the looms and many more have been enrolled in one of 11 RUGMARK-sponsored schools throughout the region. More information is available at www.rugmark.org.
IMPORTER PROFILES
AMY HELFAND
An experienced and versatile artist, Amy Helfand recently began translating her abstract landscape-inspired collages into contemporary wool rugs. In 2004, motivated by an exhibition in Bronx’s Wave Hill, Helfand designed a limited-edition carpet based on the site plan of one of the gardens there. The overwhelming popularity of this piece and her desire to create “a work of art to walk on” initiated her entrance into the carpet industry. Since then, Helfand’s commitment to only the finest quality hand knotting, asymmetrical design and images both real and imagined is propelling her as a rising rug designer.
Another factor that distinguishes Helfand’s work is her integrity in both the artistic and production process. As one of RUGMARK’s designers and importers, she shares a deep concern about the use of child labor in the handmade rug industry. “As I began to make more rugs, it only made sense to become a RUGMARK licensee so that my business would reflect a philosophy of integrity.” www.amyhelfand.com
ALICIA KESHISHIAN, A+ DESIGNS
The granddaughter of a renowned Oriental rug authority, Alicia Keshishian has grown up with carpets as a part of her life. An accomplished artist for more than 25 years with an extensive knowledge of various crafts, she has recently returned to her family’s roots. Alicia custom designs each carpet with respect for the client’s specific wishes and sense of beauty.
In addition to a daring use of color, the thread that ties her work together is a profound gratitude to the expert weavers who make her vision a reality. Alicia’s recognition of the hardship of Nepali families and the exploitation of children has compelled her to action. “Enslaved labor strips everyone of the hope for a better global community.”
She became a RUGMARK licensee so as to ensure customers their purchase does not indirectly support child labor. Instead, her successful line of RUGMARK-certified rugs has enabled former child laborers to attend school and receive vocational training. www.acarpets.com
DUNCANARTS
DuncanArts grew out of the combined creative energy of a husband-wife team with backgrounds in architecture and the arts. Their love of design, color and texture recently found a new medium - hand-knotted Tibetan carpets. All of their work is done with 100% hand-spun Himalayan wool in a vast array of colors. A modern touch weaved into traditional design themes make their rugs incredibly versatile.
In addition to their external east meets west design, DuncanArts rugs have a subtle beauty that lies beneath the surface. As a licensee of RUGMARK, their products are contributing to the elimination of child labor and the education of boys and girls in South Asian weaving communities. “To us, having our designs brought to life by illegally exploited children would be totally antithetical to the creation of beauty. Also, we believe that the individuals who are drawn to our carpets want to be enriched, not diminished, by the experience of living and growing old with them.”
MAT THE BASICS
One of the most respected and established Oriental rug importers, Mat the Basics is known for high design coupled with abundant texture. Their collections include rich, harmonious colors and organic 100% pure new wool. They offer variety in terms of shapes, colors, and sizes thus enabling customers to satisfy their particular needs.
Since the carpets are made exclusively in India, Mat the Basics has long advocated on behalf of workers in the North Indian weaving communities. They are deeply committed to fostering the livelihood of these families and therefore became RUGMARK licensees in order to have the most transparent and trustworthy manufacturing process. www.mat-thebasics.com"
REDUCES CHILD LABOR
Washington D.C.: Four rug companies recently committed to increased social standards and production transparency through membership in the nonprofit RUGMARK. A+ Designs, Amy Helfand, DuncanArts, and Mat the Basics have signed on to be licensees of RUGMARK, an inspection and certification program that verifies illegal child labor is not used and creates educational opportunities for children in the weaving communities of India, Nepal and Pakistan.
RUGMARK’s innovative monitoring system enables both importers and retailers to sell their hand-woven rugs, confident that the product’s integrity was not compromised by child exploitation. Last year, the sale of RUGMARK-certified carpets experienced 20% growth, indicating that the market is a viable mechanism for sustainable social change in South Asia. This most recent increase in collaboration between the carpet industry and RUGMARK underscores this growing trend.
When experienced artist Amy Helfand began to transition her abstract landscape collages into contemporary wool rugs, she explored RUGMARK out of her concern that children might be exploited during the weaving. “When I was looking for a manufacturer to translate my artwork into a rug, I contacted RUGMARK for a list of companies who had pledged not to use child labor,” she explains. “As I began to make more rugs, it only made sense to become a RUGMARK licensee so that my business would reflect a philosophy of integrity.”
A+ Designs owner Alicia Keshishian is among the growing list of RUGMARK licensees whose intent is to raise industry labor standards. Her passion for color and texture was inherited from her own family of accomplished artists. Keshishian was motivated to join RUGMARK as a way to give back to Nepali weaving families. “I deeply respect what skills and talent the weavers offer,” she states. “I want to further support the people that make my dream a reality.” This support is critically needed since reports from groups like UNICEF, the ILO and the U.S. Department of Labor indicate as many as 300,000 children currently work on South Asian rug looms.
Claire Duncan, of the husband and wife creative team DuncanArts, recently brought a love for contemporary design into the traditional media of hand-knotted Tibetan carpets. Having witnessed child labor while in India years ago, Duncan was sensitized to the issue and concerned about finding credible manufacturers. “The moment we learned of the existence of RUGMARK, we experienced a feeling of having come home.” Duncan not only feels relieved, but optimistic that her affiliation with RUGMARK will foster the growth of their young business.
Established companies have also looked to RUGMARK for the assurance that human rights guidelines have been implemented throughout their supply chain. Although fairly new to the U.S. market, Mat the Basics has been weaving handmade rugs in India for over 60 years. Mat the Basics rugs are known for clean lines and rich textures. The company has long been committed to workers rights in Indian weaving communities, including appropriating a just wage and vowing to be child labor-free. This pledge is reflected each time a RUGMARK-certified carpet is sold in their showroom as a portion of the proceeds goes directly toward sending former carpet children to RUGMARK-sponsored schools.
Advances in RUGMARK’s strategy both within the marketplace and weaving communities have allowed the organization to set its sights even higher. In early 2006, RUGMARK will launch a consumer education campaign with a focused effort to substantially increase the market share of RUGMARK certified rugs. With a growing alliance of designers and importers leading the way, RUGMARK believes eliminating illegal child labor in the carpet industry is within reach.
####
RUGMARK is a nonprofit organization working to end illegal child labor in the carpet industry and offer educational opportunities to children in India, Nepal and Pakistan. The RUGMARK label offers the best assurance that no illegal child labor was used in the manufacture of a carpet or rug. To date, over 3,000 children have been freed from the looms and many more have been enrolled in one of 11 RUGMARK-sponsored schools throughout the region. More information is available at www.rugmark.org.
IMPORTER PROFILES
AMY HELFAND
An experienced and versatile artist, Amy Helfand recently began translating her abstract landscape-inspired collages into contemporary wool rugs. In 2004, motivated by an exhibition in Bronx’s Wave Hill, Helfand designed a limited-edition carpet based on the site plan of one of the gardens there. The overwhelming popularity of this piece and her desire to create “a work of art to walk on” initiated her entrance into the carpet industry. Since then, Helfand’s commitment to only the finest quality hand knotting, asymmetrical design and images both real and imagined is propelling her as a rising rug designer.
Another factor that distinguishes Helfand’s work is her integrity in both the artistic and production process. As one of RUGMARK’s designers and importers, she shares a deep concern about the use of child labor in the handmade rug industry. “As I began to make more rugs, it only made sense to become a RUGMARK licensee so that my business would reflect a philosophy of integrity.” www.amyhelfand.com
ALICIA KESHISHIAN, A+ DESIGNS
The granddaughter of a renowned Oriental rug authority, Alicia Keshishian has grown up with carpets as a part of her life. An accomplished artist for more than 25 years with an extensive knowledge of various crafts, she has recently returned to her family’s roots. Alicia custom designs each carpet with respect for the client’s specific wishes and sense of beauty.
In addition to a daring use of color, the thread that ties her work together is a profound gratitude to the expert weavers who make her vision a reality. Alicia’s recognition of the hardship of Nepali families and the exploitation of children has compelled her to action. “Enslaved labor strips everyone of the hope for a better global community.”
She became a RUGMARK licensee so as to ensure customers their purchase does not indirectly support child labor. Instead, her successful line of RUGMARK-certified rugs has enabled former child laborers to attend school and receive vocational training. www.acarpets.com
DUNCANARTS
DuncanArts grew out of the combined creative energy of a husband-wife team with backgrounds in architecture and the arts. Their love of design, color and texture recently found a new medium - hand-knotted Tibetan carpets. All of their work is done with 100% hand-spun Himalayan wool in a vast array of colors. A modern touch weaved into traditional design themes make their rugs incredibly versatile.
In addition to their external east meets west design, DuncanArts rugs have a subtle beauty that lies beneath the surface. As a licensee of RUGMARK, their products are contributing to the elimination of child labor and the education of boys and girls in South Asian weaving communities. “To us, having our designs brought to life by illegally exploited children would be totally antithetical to the creation of beauty. Also, we believe that the individuals who are drawn to our carpets want to be enriched, not diminished, by the experience of living and growing old with them.”
MAT THE BASICS
One of the most respected and established Oriental rug importers, Mat the Basics is known for high design coupled with abundant texture. Their collections include rich, harmonious colors and organic 100% pure new wool. They offer variety in terms of shapes, colors, and sizes thus enabling customers to satisfy their particular needs.
Since the carpets are made exclusively in India, Mat the Basics has long advocated on behalf of workers in the North Indian weaving communities. They are deeply committed to fostering the livelihood of these families and therefore became RUGMARK licensees in order to have the most transparent and trustworthy manufacturing process. www.mat-thebasics.com"
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
LancasterOnline.com: Obituaries - Glenn L. Redcay
LancasterOnline.com: Obituaries: "Glenn L. Redcay
Published: Dec 13, 2005 EST
Glenn L. Redcay
Glenn L. Redcay, 58, of P.O. Box 343, Denver, died unexpectedly in his sleep Saturday, December 10, at the Black Horse Lodge and Suites, Denver.
Born in Lancaster, he was the son of Mary Eva (Andes) Redcay of Reinholds and the late John Redcay. He was the owner of Black Horse Lodge and Suites and Restaurant and also the Antique Showcase at the Black Horse, and was in the hospitality Business for 42 years.
A graduate of Cocalico High School in 1965 and Millersville University in 1969 with a degree in philosophy, he then taught English at Donegal High School for one year. He was a board member of Lancaster Co. PA Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau and was active for over 10 years, serving as chairman from 1979-1980. He was a member of Ephrata Chamber of Commerce & Antiques Capitol USA. An avid antique car collector, he enjoyed cross country road travel. He was the 10th generation in his family to have great interest in the PA Dutch culture.
In addition to his mother, he is survived by a daughter, Kim A. (Dale) Patrick of Irvine, CA; three grandchildren; and two brothers, Gary Redcay of Reinholds and Ed Redcay of NC. He will be sadly missed by his companion, Judy Falkiewicz of Ephrata.
Memorial service Thursday at 7:30 PM at the Roseboro Funeral Home, 533 Walnut St. Denver. There will be no viewing, however, the family will receive friends from 5-7 PM. In lieu of flowers the family requests Memorial contributions by made to the Ephrata Cancer Center for Breast Cancer Research, 460 N. Reading Rd., Ephrata, PA 17522.
Roseboro Funeral Home
6th & Walnut Sts.
Denver PA 17517"
Published: Dec 13, 2005 EST
Glenn L. Redcay
Glenn L. Redcay, 58, of P.O. Box 343, Denver, died unexpectedly in his sleep Saturday, December 10, at the Black Horse Lodge and Suites, Denver.
Born in Lancaster, he was the son of Mary Eva (Andes) Redcay of Reinholds and the late John Redcay. He was the owner of Black Horse Lodge and Suites and Restaurant and also the Antique Showcase at the Black Horse, and was in the hospitality Business for 42 years.
A graduate of Cocalico High School in 1965 and Millersville University in 1969 with a degree in philosophy, he then taught English at Donegal High School for one year. He was a board member of Lancaster Co. PA Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau and was active for over 10 years, serving as chairman from 1979-1980. He was a member of Ephrata Chamber of Commerce & Antiques Capitol USA. An avid antique car collector, he enjoyed cross country road travel. He was the 10th generation in his family to have great interest in the PA Dutch culture.
In addition to his mother, he is survived by a daughter, Kim A. (Dale) Patrick of Irvine, CA; three grandchildren; and two brothers, Gary Redcay of Reinholds and Ed Redcay of NC. He will be sadly missed by his companion, Judy Falkiewicz of Ephrata.
Memorial service Thursday at 7:30 PM at the Roseboro Funeral Home, 533 Walnut St. Denver. There will be no viewing, however, the family will receive friends from 5-7 PM. In lieu of flowers the family requests Memorial contributions by made to the Ephrata Cancer Center for Breast Cancer Research, 460 N. Reading Rd., Ephrata, PA 17522.
Roseboro Funeral Home
6th & Walnut Sts.
Denver PA 17517"
Superstars: In Memoriam: Glenn Redcay
Superstars: In Memoriam: Glenn Redcay: "In Memoriam: Glenn Redcay
Superstars, Scoop, Friday, December 16, 2005
Glenn L. Redcay, 58, owner of the Antique Showcase at the Black Horse in the Adamstown, Pennsylvania area, died unexpectedly in his sleep on Saturday, December 10, 2005.
LancasterOnline.com reported that Redcay was a board member of Lancaster Co. PA Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau and was active for over 10 years, serving as chairman from 1979-1980.
“He was a member of Ephrata Chamber of Commerce & Antiques Capitol USA. An avid antique car collector, he enjoyed cross country road travel. He was the 10th generation in his family to have great interest in the PA Dutch culture,” the site reported.
The site also reported that he is survived by a daughter, Kim A. (Dale) Patrick of Irvine, CA; three grandchildren; and two brothers, Gary Redcay of Reinholds and Ed Redcay of NC, and his mother.
The family asks that memorial contributions be made to the Ephrata Cancer Center for Breast Cancer Research, 460 N. Reading Rd., Ephrata, PA 17522."
Superstars, Scoop, Friday, December 16, 2005
Glenn L. Redcay, 58, owner of the Antique Showcase at the Black Horse in the Adamstown, Pennsylvania area, died unexpectedly in his sleep on Saturday, December 10, 2005.
LancasterOnline.com reported that Redcay was a board member of Lancaster Co. PA Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau and was active for over 10 years, serving as chairman from 1979-1980.
“He was a member of Ephrata Chamber of Commerce & Antiques Capitol USA. An avid antique car collector, he enjoyed cross country road travel. He was the 10th generation in his family to have great interest in the PA Dutch culture,” the site reported.
The site also reported that he is survived by a daughter, Kim A. (Dale) Patrick of Irvine, CA; three grandchildren; and two brothers, Gary Redcay of Reinholds and Ed Redcay of NC, and his mother.
The family asks that memorial contributions be made to the Ephrata Cancer Center for Breast Cancer Research, 460 N. Reading Rd., Ephrata, PA 17522."
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