Contemporary Turkish calligraphy master Aydin Cayir will be in Atlanta this weekend. He will hold a small exhibition and a workshop on the Turkish Islamic calligraphy with Arabic and Latin scripts. Mr. Cayir will perform an art show while providing information about the history of calligraphy and its modern applications. The event will be on September 7, 2007 at 7:30 pm at the Istanbul Center. This is a free event and open to the public.
Calligraphy is an art form in which patience and attention to detail are more important than artistic talent. What distinguishes calligraphy from ordinary handwriting is, quite simply, aesthetics. It is a “spiritual technique” that beaches out with grace and elegance to engage the eve, mind and soul. It was the Ottoman Turks who produced and perfected several varieties of this type of script. All the various branches of the art of calligraphy, an art greatly loved and respected by the Ottoman Turks, flourished particularly in the city of Istanbul and it was in Istanbul that the finest and most mature works were produced.
Aydin Cayir was born in Istanbul and graduated from the School of Divinity at the Marmara University. Cayir was interested in the art of classical calligraphy since his high school years and later on, this interest grew in him to include the Latin calligraphy. He has displayed his art and held exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, Japan, Romania and the United States. He founded his graphics design company in 1998. He was recently in the US for a project of Walt Disney World- EPCOT. He will also hold an exhibition at the 5th Atlanta Turkish Festival on September 9, 2007 which will include several Turkish art exhibitions, folk dances, concerts and take place at the Piedmont Park from 1:00 to 6:00 pm.
Istanbul Center for Culture and Dialogue
6760 Jimmy Carter Blvd Suite 110
Norcross, GA 30071
www.istanbulcenter.org
Phone: (678) 990-1717
2 comments:
Last night I attended the Aydin Cayir calligraphy demonstration at the Istanbul Center. The event started with a thorough overview of the six major styles of calligraphic writing practiced in Turkey. He described in Turkish everything to great detail and had obviously "done his homework". However the translator was not as complete leaving much unsaid. It was a lost in translation moment...
The second part of the evening was the actual demonstration of Mr. Cayir's calligraphy which left me floored. He asked us to write our names on a page which he in turn re-wrote using the techniques he showed us in the lecture. The end result was astonishing, our names in a tight beautifully composed text with embellishments and gorgeuos lines. The effort was made more amazing by the fact he "improvised" each name and knew not where the thing would go once he started. This was my favorite part of the evening.
Equally as interesting was learning of Islamic rules in calligraphy. Each letter, font style, and artwork content had its own set of rules. Each letter had a scale it must be written in with an exception on the horizontal marking, allowing them to continue for any length the hand could endure. Since drawing graven images is outlawed, using calligraphy, while still adhereing to the calligraphic set of rules, produced amazing pieces of work that resembled images using words and phrases to form them.
This was an great evening and the Istanbul Center Hosts were so hospitable. I will be going back for future events.
Chantelle and I went to this event last night, and it was amazing. His hand is so controlled, and he is such a master of this discipline. The demonstration was mind-blowing, especially since we've been trying to do hand-lettering for weeks now.
It raised some questions for me, though. I speak Hindi, and a lot of words are the same in Arabic and Hindi, because of proximity. He was speaking in Turkish, but I could make out a few words. One that I distinctly heard was "serif." Is there a definitive etymology of the term? On Wikipedia, it says the term comes from Dutch, but a google search for "Turkish Serif" yields hundreds of results, many concerning actual calligraphy...
I was wondering if you knew anything about this, Liz.
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