Angelo's Coffee Shop!

Over second and third cups flow matters of high finance, high state, common gossip and low comedy. Coffee is a social binder, a warmer of tongues, a soberer of minds, a stimulant of wit, a foiler of sleep if you want it so. From roadside mugs to the classic demi-tasse, it is the perfect democrat.

~Author Unknown

Angelo's Coffee Shop! 6x9", June 2011

Ahh, I have toiled many a cold winter's day in Naramata chatting with Angelo at Cafe Never Matter's coffee & Bistro, Looking at this exact view- Angelo behind the counter, doing his thing, me at the table directly in front. Since winter is the slow season in Naramata, Angelo never minded me bringing my laptop over to the shop, having a cup of coffee and occupying a table for hours in order to get some work done. but truth be told, I did very little work in Angelo's coffee shop since we both ended up chatting the winter hours away, often between a scone Angelo decided needed to be shared.

Luckily, Angelo likes my paintings, which were hanging in the coffee shop at the time he purchased it last summer. He asked me if I'd like to have another show at Cafe NeverMatters in July, so for the month of July I will be occupying the walls of my favourite coffee spot in Naramata! This also means I've got a trip back to the Okanagan planned for the week before the Canada Day long weekend!

Last year I had my Turkish paintings up, and though I will have some Canadian repeats of last year, I've been trying to get more Okanagan prints up for this year. Two weeks before the show, I'm still painting! But I'm almost there. I hope Naramata likes what it sees!

I took this picture in a hurry, the morning I left for Vancouver. I just wanted enough information to do a little painting of Angelo in his coffee shop.

For more information on Cafe Never matters, Click Here.

See you in July in Naramata!

xxMelanie

New Painting: Life in Sultanahmet!

Istanbul, a universal beauty where poet and archeologist, diplomat and merchant, princess and sailor, northerner and westerner screams with same admiration. The whole world thinks that this city is the most beautiful place on earth.

~Edmondo De Amicis

Life in Sultanahmet. Im not sure if this will be the official title of this painting, but it will be for now!

It's no secret, I miss living in Istanbul. I've become that sad woman who still pines for her long lost lover, in this case my former lover is the city of Istanbul. A year and a half later the city still plagues my thoughts, creeps it's way into my conversations, my dreams, the artwork I do. I have very good reasons for leaving, just as I'll have very good reasons for returning one day. But luckily for me, unlike former lovers, Istanbul isn't going anywhere, and will willingly take me back anytime I choose to slip into it's warm embrace. Ahhh, Istanbul, you're a whore, but my love affair with you is never ending. As Fatih Mehmet once said, "Either I conquer Istanbul or Istanbul conquers me."

When I think of wandering the streets of Sultanahmet with Rene,

I think of umbrellas, kitties and market days.

This painting is a bit of a special one, because I've painted some personal elements of my own life in the painting, not just the idillic aspects of life I usually aim for. Sultanahmet in particular is bursting with the kind of detail I thrive on. The cats are the sultans at street level, the seagulls reign over the skies. Everyday simple activities, such as stopping to pet cats, shaking out carpets, picking up the day's bread (Bread is very important in Turkey) and lowering a basket to collect your groceries are all awesome subject matter for painting in my opinion. I miss this simple yet colourful kind of life, of going to the vegetable markets on Wednesdays, chatting with neighbours, stopping for tea with Musa, peeking around the dark corners with Rene and discovering ancient things that were new to us.

You never know what could be below your feet in Istanbul.

One thing I loved about Sultanahmet in particular as that I always wondered what was below my feet, as Sultanahmet, being the seat of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, was often raised to the ground in fire and battle, creating the possibility for people to discover new things, such as palace rooms below carpet shops and houses, even abandoned cisterns under people's basements. I've read that people used to fish into the cisterns through holes in their basements. One famous cistern next to Hagia Sophia was built with Roman columns looted from a nearby temple, the giant head of the Pagan Goddess Medusa upside down and drowned in the water, to show that Christianity now ruled the Empire. Thousands of Janissaries were slaughtered and buried under the floor of the hippodrome, a place I usually walked through to get to the Metro everyday. Vlad the Impaler's head (better known as Dracula) once swung off a spike at the Topkapi Palace but was later misplaced- either sent to a watery grave in the Marmara Sea or buried somewhere under Bank Street, is the rumour. You can't make this stuff up! Istanbul is built on stories, each one fuelling, thrilling and inspiring. Sigh.

Aside from my sister and I returning from the Wednesday shopping trip at the market, I also included two famous (or infamous!) inhabitants of Sultanahmet- My neighbour Virginia, an American who owned the Family Pizza Pie Place in Sultanahmet and graciously agreed to host our first exhibit, Paintings Prints and Pizza! In 2009. She then moved shop over to Java Studio and we had another exhibit there later in the year. In the mornings we often had chats over the balcony, drinking coffee in the sun, admiring the weed-type tendencies of the grape vines on our balcony.

Musa, was our landlord, and I have written a blog about Musa's weaving. (Link at the bottom of the page.) He is a self taught weaver and uses mostly natural dyes. But Musa thwarts Turkish tradition and does his own Kilim designs, sometimes swirled patterns, sometime tulips or reproduced works of art in tapestry. The kilim above is one we bought for my mother for Christmas; She fell in love with Musa's weaving and so we traded our washing machine for this kilim when we left. I still keep in touch with Musa, Our emails short but hilarious. He is my Turkish Papa, currently hanging out in Muscat for the next month at a big exhibition being held there.

Sultanahmet Boy sometimes as pesky as the seagulls and the cats. But always with shiny shoes!

This guy is no one in particular, but he's got two things distinctly Sultanahmet about him. One, he's got a loaf of bread tucked under his arm, which is an important part of life in Turkey. Bread is the staple of life, and so it is never casually tossed on the ground or in the garbage. This is a little bit of a hardship for foreigners like me who don't really want to offend the locals, but can't plough through a loaf of bread in a day, even if my sister helps me. I have also heard that birds are not set up digestively to break down gluten in their systems, so feeding stale bread to the birds is not necessarily a good idea (Depending on what you think of seagulls, of course!). Many locals soak bread in milk and feed it to the numerous stray cats, which might be a good way of disposing it, as I bet cats have tougher digestive systems. I could be wrong here though.

This guy also has pointy leather shoes, the big style for carpet salesmen working in Sultanahmet. I personally find them a little silly looking, but these men primp and polish their shoes lovingly as rich men polish sports cars. Just below the shoes you'll notice a pearl necklace lost in the dirt. If you look closely, you'll notice there is a coptic cross on the necklace, a shout out to the Byzantine Empire, and this is also a design element that pops up in the cave paintings in Cappadoccia in Central Turkey.

The sky over Sultanahmet.

And lastly the sky. I had a lot of trouble with this sky, partly because I'd drawn umbrellas into the composition but it wasn't raining. Any attempt at a cloudy sky didn't feel right. I wasn't getting it, and the rough sky didn't seem to fit with the rest of the painting. So I decided to lay a design over the sky to solve that problem. The sky is now one of my favourite parts about this painting. If you are familiar with my work you'll know that I like to work detail like this, and it is particularly fitting for a painting of Istanbul, which is covered in layers of it's own perfect intricate designs. I've never done any paintings with this tight, shell-shaped design, though this basic shape is found in the cobblestone streets all over Istanbul. I wanted something organized and perfect (but not too perfect! It still needs personality!), as much as Turkish design is based on geometry and perfection.

Links:

Paintings Prints and Pizza! Sultanahmet Exhibit

Exhibit at Java Studio

Musa and his weaving

xxMelanie

The Last Experiment of the Term: Silk Painting!

The Painter on Silk

There was a man

Who made his living

By painting roses

upon silk.

He sat in an upper chamber

and painted,

And the noises of the street

meant nothing to him.

When he heard bugles and fifes and drums

He thought of red, and yellow and white roses

Bursting in the sunshine,

And smiled as he worked.

He thought only of roses,

and of silk.

When he could get no more silk,

He stopped painting

and only thought

of roses.

The day the conquerors entered the city

The old man

Lay dying.

He heard the bugles and the drums,

And wished he could paint the roses,

Bursting into sound.

~Amy Lowell

The last experiment in textiles for this term was silk painting, and it took us two weeks to complete it. One week to apply the cold beeswax paste, let it dry, and another week to apply the silk dye. It isn't really that difficult to do, you just need the right supplies.

Stretching the silk onto the stretcher- much easier with four hands!

First, we were given silk and stretchers in order to create our working surface. First, we wet the silk with water to make it easier to stretch. We then attached the silk to the frame by stretching in and securing it with thumbs tacks. It's important not to line the tacks up across from each other but to skew them so the result is even tension across the surface of the silk. It's not as easy as it looks and I had to redo mine.

Tacking up the silk.

Next, we took a bottle of emulsified wax, put it in a little squeeze bottle that had a metal nib on it and we began drawing our image, making sure all of the lines joined up in order to create an area of silk that the very runny dye could be spread and contained.

My drawing!

Our instructor told us she used to use hot beeswax in the classroom until someone tripped over the cord of the electric frying pan and sent the wax sailing. Though it smelled beautiful in there for months, it was such a safety hazard with the slippery floor, the students couldn't wear their shoes in the classroom for months! (Socks are less slippery on well-waxed linoleum!) So we used cold wax (and it certainly didn't smell as nice as the real stuff!)

My drawing placed under the silk as a guide.

Emulsified wax applied!

Then we let it dry for a week.

After a week, we began painting our image.

Our instructor showing us how it's done.

So here is mine once I had carefully painted in my areas. If you were careless with the brush, a spot might find itself in another area of colour you hadn't anticipated, so I learned that if you quickly scrubbed it out with a paint brush, you could stop those specks from spreading. I was also lucky with this design because I didn't have any huge expanses of areas that needed a wash of colour. It's important to paint quickly with silk paints as they can leave drags of colour if you aren't quick enough.

All ready to dry and have the wax removed!

And when I left it in the studio that night to dry, it was as perfect as it was ever going to be. So imagine my dismay when I arrived the next day to pick it up, to find someone a little less careful had splattered my little mosque with tonnes of splatters! I suppose this is one of the hazards of sharing studio space. Boo!

Ufff! Splotchy!!! Someone lost some karma points.

It might have been me with the torrent of swear words that followed discovering my speckled mosque!

Harumph!

Anyway, I brought it home and gave it a good iron between sheets of newsprint. The newsprint soaked up the extra wax but didn't transfer ink like using newspaper would have done. I know there are fancy ways of removing wax by steaming but truthfully, I was looking at this as a dud and just decided to get the wax off the quickest way possible.

Goodbye silk painting, and goodbye Vancouver for the holidays! I'm at the Naramata Artisan Faire this weekend and then it is full steam ahead on some painting.

and I've got some new ideas!

xxMelanie