Design in Center and Periphery: Three Generations of Armenian Ceramic Artists in Jerusalem

The Artistic Language of Marie Balian

In Marie Balian's early works, it is already possible to detect efforts to draw gazelles and birds in motion. In contrast with the static images of the Karakashian-Balian workshop, Marie Balian presents her animals in motion, with their heads turned, running and galloping. Her birds also move, lifting and bending their heads. Not only do the images themselves move; Marie has also begun to develop a personal handwriting, characterized by a moving, wavy, and feminine line. In addition, she has a well-shaped vocabulary of images whose meanings must be understood. Her composition is ostensibly symmetrical, but in actuality, simultaneous narratives unfold on each side and at the top and bottom of the drawing.

The changes are of primary importance. The world that Marie depicts is no longer symmetrical, but rather has taken into consideration an infinite variety of parallel events. Her affinity for conflict, for the equivocal and for distance, echoes in her fantastic and legendary compositions of objects. Nonetheless, her yearning and desire is to intuitively create a world that is legendary in its beauty. The world created by Marie Balian's art is one of sensual beauty built through the harmony among the forms and the splendor of the light shining on the glazed tile.

Beauty as a sensual and idyllic quality is alien and foreign to twentieth century Western art, which is concerned primarily with the individual and radical expression, with the debating of conventions and, primarily, with the conscious deconstruction of traditional representations of beauty. The art of Marie Balian in Jerusalem sought to create a beauty that would reflect divine acts in material objects. Thus, her description of extensive and dazzling vegetation serves as a Fata Morgana, a mirage in miniature. The objects themselves also function on several levels: on the sensual level of touch, on the aesthetic level, as a vision of paradise, and on the symbolic level, as a promise.

In a country, where the landscape is barren, arid, and desolate, dressed in concrete and cement, the ceramic art of Marie Balian enables us to touch a material object that functions as a garden in the desert (figs. 14-18).

The Art of Stephan Karakashian

In 1964 Stephan Karakashian and his brother Berj left the workshop they shared with Setrak and Marie Balian and set up their own workshop in the Via Dolorosa, while the Balian family continued to live and work in the old workshop at 14, Nablus Street.

Through almost the entire forty years of his creative work, Stephan has preserved central designs passed on to him by his father and from the common workshop. He has focused on the precise painting of those designs, but produced them in a changing spectrum of colors and on tiles and vessels in a variety of forms.

I believe that in addition to the ongoing and intimate dialogue between Stephan Karakashian and the common workshop, in which his father was the painter, he also found a source of inspiration in one particular group of Iznik's ceramic artists. This group, dated by Raby to the mid sixteenth century,⁹ developed the motif of a flowering cherry tree, its branches spreading across the whole plate. The blossoms are drawn with simplicity in a variety of colors. A similar group from the same period also produced birds (generally one bird in a thicket of leaves). Karakashian journeyed to Istanbul in the 1970s, and his repeated encounters with the ceramic paintings there most certainly reinforced his affinity.

The diligent study of the Iznik lexicon of forms by Stephan, is expressed in frontal depictions of garlands of flowers, in the main shown inside small jugs placed at the bottom of the picture. The flowers are smaller and a multitude of leaves appear on the branches. In addition, the motif of bunches of grapes, so typical to a certain group of Iznik's ceramic artists, is also manifested by Stephan, albeit in his own independent style.

The Most Prominent Designs of the Karakashian Workshop

The focal designs that appeared in work produced by the Karakashian workshop were those of arabesques; birds nesting in the thicket; flowers and vine tendrils (figs.19 and 20); fish, flowers; orderly branches of grapes; a fawn with upward gaze; and biblical scenes, most of which were freely copied from eighteenth century tiles in the Armenian church of St. James.

• Birds

In all the examples of birds depicted by Stephan Karakashian the birds dominate the scene. Some of Karakashian's birds can be compared to the traditional Iznik designs of the sixteenth century, but they became the central motif of the composition. Karakashian's portrayal of their spread feathers endows them with central and independent importance as a meaningful image.

Main Bird Designs:

1. A crane flying with fantail, neck and beak stretched upward and orange flowers around its neck. Appearing to move as the plate is rotated. The crane image appears on a hexagonal tile created by the common workshop. It is based on a drawing on an ancient bowl, discovered in Fustat (Old Cairo) in Egypt and now in the Islamic Museum of Cairo.

2. A fabulous white bird, strutting across a landscape of tendrils. Its fantail is erect, composed of circles borne on stalks. It faces a branch with small leaves, drawn in a half-circle.

3. A long-tailed bird of paradise, the tail in three sections. The neck is curved like that of a swan. This bird is painted in various colours but always against a white background, with the tree on which it perches designed as colourful tendrils, mostly comprising upper and lower twines with flowers among them.

4. A pair of peacocks with necks entwined and two enormous spread tails, portrayed as an autonomous element in the form of huge leaves, containing colourful circles. This design can be compared with the Iznik design in which two birds stretch out their beaks to one another.

5. Spread-tailed peacock, displayed frontally. The fantail serves as a medallion within which is a design of round forms (fig.21).

6. Four birds (fig.22) and six birds (fig.23) – two designs taken from the Armenian Bird Mosaic.

7. Two tiny long-tailed birds on two branches of a flowering tree with blue and yellow blossoms. The tails are depicted in bold, almost graphic, lines.

8. A single bird on a flowering branch. The tree branches are shown frontally and rise upwards like a candelabra. The bird's tail and plumage are detailed, concrete and in myriad colours.

9. A bird in flight with a fantastic tail, its two long trains sweeping out into the pictorial space from within the mass of feathers. The tail and feathers also constitute a charged image, recalling a wild plant, flames or emerging spring's streams (fig.24).

10. Fish and birds together. A unique combination by Stephan Karakashian on one plate: creatures of the skies and the earth united in one space. In the centre of the plate, on a blue background, are three white fishes contained in a circular frieze. The fish appear to be flying in their movement. Encircling the plate are small birds with spread wings, their bodies resembling those of the fish.

Karakashian's birds are an expression of his style: strong outlines, determined and bold, offering an intensive and powerful expression. The colors are local and heavily layered. One prominently colorful group is that of the above-mentioned bird designs in white against a blue, pale blue or even orange or green background. White bird images, also with the addition of several secondary colors on tail and wings, convey a sense of mystery and legend.

Karakashian turn the birds into a static element, endowing his painting with a characteristic lack of movement. Even the crane flying with outspread wings, painted in white against a blue background, is depicted as an emblem of 'flying crane' and not as a celebration in the sky. These same birds receive additional meaning when appearing as colorful birds against a white background. This change in the artist's palette enables a transition from the mystery of white birds to a depiction of nature in spring. Karakashian's bird images are isolated and stylized. The components endow them with a symbolic character. The fixed, static and isolated forms draw the observer's curiosity and demand an inquiry into their significance. To characterize Stephan Karakashian's personal hand writing one should compare his works with those of his father in the common workshop. (Karakashian, by the way, in an interview in March 2000, emphasized that he learned his art from always having his table adjacent to that of his father ¹⁰).

To conclude, in his work Karakashian tends to select individual motifs and turn them into the main theme of the new composition, thereby enhancing their importance.

Artist and Workshop - Consciousness and Identity

The parallel work of the Armenian ceramic painters, Stephan Karakashian and Marie Balian, each with their own workshop artists, enables a singular examination of the similarities and differences in the creative paths of the two artists: one can follow their approach to identical designs that each had received when the first generation common workshop separated; the ways in which each of them preserved traditional designs; the methods of introducing changes and developments; their paintings and artistic concepts, and the link between the two artists and the paintings being carried out in their workshop.

Studies of the work of artists in the Middle Ages, and even during the Renaissance, do not always provide sufficient information on the designs available to the workshops, on the approach of the workshop's master to the various levels of workers, or their attitude to the art of the master. The ability to follow the works of Marie Balian and Stephan Karakashian throws light on the work methods of earlier periods of artistic workshops.

First and foremost one can see how a particular design was preserved over the generations, and a design that we recognize from the common workshop of the 1930s, still exists in the present workshops of 2001. As noted, the designs were developed or preserved in different ways. Furthermore, one can see new connections of old designs, also familiar from the common Balian-Karakashian workshop.

One can easily identify the master artist's style. The works of Marie Balian, for example, are prominent in their linear movement, combination of colors, complex composition of several planes and figures. Her vessels have several sides: face, back and sides, and her plates have two sides: top and bottom. In contrast, Stephan Karakashian's works usually select only one major image, spread over its entire face of the utensil, generally on the lower, emphasized part of the picture. In addition, his works are characterized by few images, symmetrically arranged over the area.

Regarding this latter aspect, we shall examine the design of the spread-winged phoenix, created by Megerdish Karakashian in the common workshop. Stephan Karakashian too, as well as Marie Balian, each returned to this design according to their own perceptions. A comparison between the two is highly revealing. Stephan's phoenix (fig.25), to which he returned many times on both plate and tile paintings, shows a long white neck, very sharp beak and outspread wings across the plate or tile, matching the frame design: the round frame of a plate or the square one of a tile. The wing feathers are colored schematically in orange, blue, white and pale blue. The plumage is in pale blue and black. The bird's long neck resembles that of a fabulous swan, thrusting out from its body, in effect creating geometrical shapes that match the plate and its directions.

Marie Balian's phoenix (fig.26) - a design seldom repeated - is painted on a plate with a white background. The bird is smaller than the surface of the plate and each side features bunches of colorful flowers. The bird's wings are not carefully colored; quite the opposite: the black outlines of the frame are created in swift, impressionistic brush strokes. Balian's aim is to depict the bird as flying between the colorful flowers, in strict contrast with Stephan Karakashian's phoenix, whose neck stretches out from the almost autonomous forms of the wings, integrating as one with the plate.

Today the Balian ceramic enterprises address various groups of consumers. Two internet sites serve the Balian factory in Jerusalem, www.armenianceramics.com and www.palestinianpottery.com.

The Karakashian ceramics addresses a wide traditional very faithful clientele and additional visitors and tourists to the old city of Jerusalem. The work routine however in Nablus Road did not change; and Marie Balian's son, Nishan, runs the projects and Marie occasionally contributes new designs.