All posts filed under: Own mosaic works

Next summer – Ayvalik!

Published by gertrud

How about a vacation in Turkey in a beautiful old stone house with a mosaic floor in the bathroom? We rent out our summer house in the quaint town of Ayvalik on the North Aegean coast of Turkey. https://www.manzara-apartments.com/en/mozaikli-ev-en/# I lived in Turkey with my family 12 years ago and bought this summer house there. For me, this was a great opportunity to create a mosaic floor in the classic style. So many people were interested in it during production that I started this blog. The house is situated on a hill in the middle of the small town of Ayvalik, which has remained very unspoilt and has not yet seen much international tourism. There is a market twice a week where the whole town is filled with families from the surrounding villages and you can buy everything from fresh local vegetables, socks and underpants to hand-carved spoons made from olive wood. And not just the spoons, but of course the oil and the olives themselves, as Ayvalik is located in Turkey’s largest olive-growing region. …

My teachers for natural stone mosaics

Published by gertrud

8 years ago I designed, produced and laid a 4m2 floor mosaic in our vacation home in Ayvalik on the North Aegean coast. This work and my involvement with it brought me into contact with Turkish artists who taught me a lot and, from whom I learned how to work with natural stone and roman cement. My first teacher was Mustafa Salih Kamanlioglu. He runs a mosaic studio in Ankara. He taught me how to break natural stone into small pieces for mosaic (tesserae). My second master was Nusret Özdemir. He lives in Gaziantep, in the south east of Turkey and taught me how to assess field stones for mosaic suitability. I also learned from him how to break a tessera into a small tooth so that they can be placed closer together. A third teacher was Hande Kökten, who was the director of Ankara University’s School of Restoration Technicians at the time. Despite my limited Turkish, she admitted me to her lessons on the conversation of ancient mosaics. There I mainly learned how to …