(colours in the above I assume to be all vegetable dyes; size - 140cms x 180cms)
In my post art objects 33, I wrote about Ugur and his shop
I liked Ugur a lot: he had a genuine love of beautiful things and a willingness to share his knowledge about Turkish rugs. And he appreciated my appreciation of his treasures, and the way that I would always home in on the pieces which he himself regarded as the special ones. I would sit on woven cushions and he would offer me tea. It was English tea served in an English mug, yet his manner, accent and above all the decor would take me back forty years to the time when Istanbul was my home city, and I could visit the covered bazaar every day if I wished - and I was young! Ugur and his partner put a great deal of love and care into their shop, and it should have been a runaway success - but commerce is a fickle mistress. They got some things wrong - I don’t even know entirely which - and the business never took off. It must have been a long drawn-out, painful death to all their plans and dreams.
I had the good fortune to be able to buy not one, but two beautiful rugs from Ugur, during the time that his shop was open. In fact, after the half a year or more that it took me to pay off the graveyard rug described in the post just quoted from, I was relaxing, before taking my prize away. Obviously, given Ugur’s and my shared passion, the natural way to relax was to talk about carpets, particularly old carpets, and one thing leading to another, it was not long before Ugur was rooting through piles looking for… ‘you see?’ ‘Yes, ’it’s definitely got something, but it’s a bit busy for me / these are not my favourite colours / I feel as if the proportions are not quite right here…’ And then - out came the carpet shown above, and I had my second big shock from Ugur’s. When I say shock, I’m not referrring to the price, which I knew in advance was going to be too much for me, but the beauty of the thing - the delicacy of the colours, the patina that a carpet acquires only with age and use, the designs and proportions - this carpet had everything. So, to cut a long story short, I enslaved myself for another twelve months, after having ascertained from Ugur that he was prepared to put up with the considerable time it was going to take me to pay this carpet off, and it that it would be only by very modest increments. I suppose, despite these obvious annoyances, the upside for him was that he knew that this carpet, for which he could not but have a special affection, would end up with someone who genuinely appreciated it as he did.
The slightly sad footnote to all this came when I bought the small Milas (art objects 4) some years later: apparently, as I was told on that occasion, the modern rugs being produced in this area have taken a complete nose-dive in quality. Whatever the particular magic which has found its way into my two Milas carpets of the previous generation, this magic seems to have been lost.
My attitude to living with beautiful things has, I imagine, been coloured by the fact that I was brought up entirely without them. It was my first college girlfriend - who had tried but failed to get into art college - who first opened my eyes to the world of aesthetics. It took another three decades or so for me to be able to shake off the guilt associated with my protestant upbringing to a sufficient degree to actually feel able to start, slowly and hesitantly at first, bringing into my life, as my own possessions, beautiful objects. Certainly, two legacies remain from my early years: first, I prefer functional objects, though I do have a few items whose place in my collection is not related to their immediate usefulness. Second, I have my own sense of proportion about prices, which reflects the modest financial circumstances in which I have spent my life: recently, I was told that the current price of a genuine Victorian wrought iron table and set of chairs for the garden would be around £3,000-4,000 (double that for US dollars), and I know that I would not be willing to throw this kind of money at that kind of item: so I guess I have to assume that the puritan in me is still, in some corner of my psyche, alive and well.
At the end of the day, as the saying goes, ‘there are no pockets in a shroud.’ So the ultimate test for me of the ethical acceptability of owning beautiful things is this: has their presence in my life enabled me - through my creative work, for example, to give back more and better than I would otherwise have been able to do? Now there’s a tricky piece of auditing to do!
It remains for me to say: enjoy!
