Materials, tools and techniques of Islamic artists

This lesson asks you to explore traditional and current materials, tools and techniques of visual artists and to adapt them in your own work. The museum offers only three examples from Islamic art, below; the materials in your studio and the current technologies come from your class. ¹

Look at how each record prepares its material before the art begins: grinding, pounding, cutting, inlaying. Note the steps and the order in which they come, and what each step protects or makes possible.

Choose one step and ask which current material or tool could do the same work. Say what would be gained and what would be lost.

Some colours harmed the page. In the pigments record Norah Titley calls copper green, verdigris, made by treating copper with vinegar, "a conservationist's nightmare" ². The paper becomes brittle and drops out leaving a hole, and the pigment eats through and stains neighbouring pages brown ². The blue came from lapis lazuli, lightened with ceruse white; vermilion came from cinnabar and yellow from antimony ².

The record on inlaid metalwork rests on the Nuhad Es-Said collection booklet (Riyadh 1985) ³. It names the metals: brass and bronze inlaid with gold, silver and copper ⁴. It names Herat pieces of four-metal alloy or high-tin bronze inlaid with silver, copper and a black compound ^{5 6}. It names a steel kashkul overlaid with gold of 1015 AH ⁷. It does not say how the inlay was cut or fixed, so the record answers which metals and where, not how.

The green made from copper makes the paper brittle, so that it drops out and leaves a hole ². Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: should a maker be judged by what a material does to a work centuries later?

• Pigments and gold in Persian painting: the green, the blue and the gold, with the binders that held them.
• Inlaid metalwork: brass and bronze vessels inlaid with gold, silver and copper.
• Calligrapher (khattat): the reed pen, the soot ink and the paper treated with starch, egg white and alum.

Read the record on pigments and gold in Persian painting and the one on inlaid metalwork. Draw the steps of one of them as a short sequence, and mark the step you would try first in your studio.