Chris says "Another
essential part of this level of accuracy is that, in the
earliest and most highly developed versions of the classical
design types, you
see a 1:1 ratio of the horizontal to vertical in the knots. It
is difficult to achieve, because the Turkish knot is doubled
horizontally, and when the weft is put in and packed down it
also pushes the carpet even further into a more horizontal
orientation. What we do, which is a little more difficult, but
which gives us the proper ratio of horizontal and vertical knots
is we often use a doubled or thicker weft to give us a little
more vertical orientation, and we also pack the knots more
tightly horizontally than vertically.”
At first, he says, he did try
to make exact copies of particular carpets. But several things
quickly changed his attitude towards this approach. While he
was making his cartoons, he found that there were many little
decisions to make, is there a red knot here, or a yellow, that
would resolve this particular geometrical figure, and he found
that often he still had to make creative decisions, it wasn't
always black and white. |
“Much as we imagine the
weavers had to make choices as they were looking at a sketch or
vagireh or certainly when they were weaving strictly from memory.”
And something else altered his
attitude towards making exact copies of certain carpets with
one of the first carpets he made, which was a “Lotto”, named
after the Italian Renaissance painter, with a Cartouche border,
similar to the border we see in the later Lotto rugs, like the one in
the Vermeer painting, “Sleeping Maid” .
“This border of this carpet
at first struck me as very simple, but also very deep in its
visual resonance, so I just had to understand it, to draw it, to
possess it, and then to make a carpet with that particular
border. But the Lotto field that we see in the carpets this
late in this line of development is actually less sophisticated,
more what the scholar call degenerate, than the earlier
classical Lotto fields.” |