Mosaic Moments

And I really feel that I  and THE MOSAIC have come home! Knowing that this home is not where my family is gives me a crunch in the stomach.

The fish figures that were still wrapped for two weeks are taken out of their bubble wrap blankets and seem to be happy to hear the waves of the aegean sea for the first time.

I arrange my workplace  in the patio in front of Santimetre’s former atelier. In the morning I just have to walk through the garden and down a few steps to be at  work.

Finally I again manage to set up a working routine, especially for the background tesserae as they are placed mainly in line but still have to be put down thoughtfully in order to achieve a good mix of shades of beige.

I can visit THE HOUSE for the mosaic every day and feel completely happy and relaxed. I can go and smoke a cigaret on the roof top of the atelier and see the sea and the sun set. And I have interested friends around that I can talk to about techniques and materials.

There is Tulya Madra who hosts me and THE MOSAIC. My special thank is to her for showing interest in my mosaic work from the first moment we met and to be so explicit that she likes what I am doing.

Tulya is the crafter and manager of the porcelain workshop SANTIMETRE and makes dishes for everyday use.  I invite you to  watch their website, you will be enchanted!

There is Firat Aykac our architect who helped me not only with the design of the mosaic in photoshop and paper print outs but also made my first tree trunk out of olive wood to hold one important tool – the Hardie!

And there is Evrim the stone macon and his partner who come twice to the studio and look at my work and chat about the best way how to get the wall pieces onto the wall.

…. and of course there is Hamdi, who runs a fine small restaurant Argos Ayvalik on the shore of the sea and and is the best address when you are alone and with friends always with the best food, the best music and a good chat until late at night.

After now 6 weeks of working for 10 hours almost every day I do miss a my family

….. and last weekend my husband  comes to visit me and THE MOSAIC!

I am proud to show him my work and life.

But he also brings the message that they can not live any longer without wife and mother so far away in Brazil. So I have to take a decision:

Either living on my own in Ayvalik and finish the mosaic there and at the same time being near the house for the mosaic and observe the building work, with my own friends and contacts in the mosaic world,

or moving  to my family in Brazil, chauffeuring teenagers around and attend receptions and dinner parties again, arranging a large household, learning a new language, finding new friends and mosaic interested persons and keep working on the mosaic —

The decision is: I will move again! with my  design and stones, and hammer and hardie, and nippers — over the Atlantic into the tropics.

On Friday Sept 11 , 50kg of stone material for tesserae and tools are being shipped to Brasilia.

I am leaving Ayvalik with all its lovely supportive people and THE (half finished) MOSAIC  on Sept 14!

In my head  lots of uncertainties:

Will the boxes arrive in Brasilia?

Will I find a tree trunk and somebody to cut it for me to mount the hardie again?

Will I find the glue that I used?

Will the glue hold the stones even in tropical climate during rain season?

Will I find the time and energy to work on the mosaic next to learning to get to know a new place, culture and language?

How will I  bring the mosaic pieces back to Ayvalik ?

This week its cutting, cutting, cutting stone. Now Mustafa has his pride and I am not allowed to join in.

So I start making the first wall piece inside the adjacent room as the wind is so strong on the open roof that I am afraid that the small tesserae are being blown away.

In the mean time Mustafa and I have an ongoing discussion how to know when there will be enough tesserae for the background and how we could measure it.

Finally we have the idea to put the printed design on the floor and spread the tesserae slightly heaped on it to see if it fills the background. It is not so easy to do this in the strong sea breeze and incredibly hot sun on a roof top! So we wait until sunset one less windy day.

This proofed to be a good method and by Wednesday we have enough tesserae.

Thursday is packing up time again because Mustafa has to leave back to Ankara. He offers to leave me a key to his apartment so that I could keep working there.

 

But I prefer to finally move the mosaic workshop to its place where it should be – to AYVALIK.

Tulya – the ceramic crafter – offers me her old atelier in her house where I am living anyway – 100m away from our house. So on Thursday, Sept 3 the stones, the ready figures and the tools, (except the cutting machine) move to the town and the house where I feel at home so much.

So – I arrived in Ayvalik on Saturday Aug, 22 and settled for the weekend with my friend Tulya Madra. THE HOUSE that is supposed to host the Ayvalik Mosaic is further under renovation.

As it happened – Mustafa Salih – my first mosaic teacher (who already played a part in this story in lending me the hydraulic stone cutting machine), happen to have a holiday apartment in Sarimsakli. Sarimsakli is the longest sandy beach on the aegean coast and is 3km  south from the centre of Ayvalik.

Mustafa offered to help with the mosaic. So all the stones and ready fish figures were shipped to his house and when I arrived on Sunday, Aug 23 the Kargo already had been delivered and the workshop set up on his roof top overlooking a tiny bit of the sea.

One has to consider that there were about 80kg of goods that came from Gaziantep and that were damped on the street and 60 year old Mustafa carried it all up a tiny flight of stairs to his roof top!

We have a nice evening with him, his wife and sister and sister in law getting carried away in eating and drinking, so I only briefly explain to Mustafa that the next step would be to cut the discs of beige background lime stone into about 1x1cm tesserae suitable for the background.

On Monday I started my internship in Pergamon which is  50km from south-east of Ayvalik.

Coming back on Tuesday I realize that all the beige stone that were collected in the most treacherous terrain at the far east of Turkey and that we managed to cut at the last minute in the marble workshop in Gaziantep and then came all the way from there to Ayvalik,  was in the wrong size!

Mustafa had enthusiastically cut it all – but in about 2x2cm squares so that we now have to cut it again.  Cutting it again into smaller tesserae we will loose at least a third if not half of the material! How disappointed and angry I was with myself that I did not pay more attention to detailed explanation and just assumed he would know as the more experienced mosaic craftsman!

I decided to leave my internship and move back to Ayvalik and not leave my precious work in the hand of others without being there.

It took me the rest of the week to get over the shock and find more similar colored marble. In the end I decided to use also the marble of our kitchen floor.

Mustafa saw the damage, helped collecting more similar colored marble from nearby marble dealers and after some discussion agreed to cut all the material for the background.

It is now necessary to cut ALL the material for the background as I we will use  6 slightly different tones and texture of stone . It all needs to be cut and mixed before we start using it in order to avoid patches of the same color and get an even mix.