Describing pattern and surface

This lesson asks you to use the right words for the elements and principles of design, and to understand some techniques artists use to get a specific effect. The museum offers three cases of pattern and surface from Islamic art: interlacing bands, plant ornament, and cut tile. The terms of your own studio come from your class. ¹

Look at the three cases and list the words the records use for line, shape, surface and colour. Choose the three words you think a classmate would need most.

Pick one effect, such as black letters on a clay ground, and write the steps the record gives. Say which step creates the effect.

Newcomb describes how the Arabic and Kufic inscriptions on the borders of tile panels are made. They are made from whole glazed tiles, usually black. The inscription is laid out and the surface round the letters is cut through the glaze to the terracotta with chisels or sharp hammers, leaving black letters on a terracotta ground, a process demanding great skill. ^{2 3} So the letters are the glaze that is left, and the ground is the terracotta the tools have uncovered. This differs from true mosaic, in which the pieces are cut and laid like marble or glass tesserae. ²

Everything the museum holds on this technique comes from one monograph, written by Rexford Newcomb, professor of the history of architecture, and published in 1929 by a tile manufacturers' association in New York. ⁴ It leans heavily on Rivoira, Migeon, Saladin, the Marçais brothers, Bel and Gallotti, quoting them at length, and was written for American architects. ^{5 6} For the history, Newcomb notes that Alfred Bel cites the author of the Rawd al-Qirtas (c. 1325) on the fourteenth-century care for building with enamelled tiles, marble and carving, as the revetments of fourteenth-century madrasas, mosques and houses bear out. ^{7 2}

Newcomb describes black letters cut from glazed tile, and he quotes writers who came before him. Can a report on how zellij inscriptions were made rely on his monograph alone, and what is the strongest argument against your answer?

• Zellij: the kinds of Moroccan ceramic mosaic, how they were made and their history at Fez.
• The Decorative Tiles of North Africa: the monograph this description rests on.
• Arabesque: plant ornament whose leaves stay joined to their stalks.
• Girih: a short record on interlacing bands that build stars and polygons, common in Seljuk and Safavid architecture.

Read the records on the arabesque and zellij. Describe one pattern in six sentences, using at least four words taken from the records.