Turkish Art Of Water Marbling
Although art of water marbling is used, together with illuminated manuscript and hat (Islamic calligraphy), on book pages, muraqqa margins, binders, article margins, yet it is, today, considered a work of art on its own today.
It is performed by transferring patterns created by spraying over intensified liquid dyes derived from nature which do not face under sunlight, do not dissolve in water and are free from acid with the aid of brushes made of horse hair and rose branch to the paper. Water marbling, one of the most dazzling ones of paper decoration, has varieties such as battal, gel-git, taraklı, şal, hatip and çiçekli.
Art of water marbling is known in the West as Turkish Paper or Turkish Marble Paper. Europeans call the water marbling paper marble paper. Clusters of color looking like clouds form over the water marbling paper. Therefore, the word Ebri, meaning cloud like, cloud, was used to describe it.
First forms of water marbling were seen in Central Asia and they became widespread across Anatolia. All dyes used for art of water marbling are naturally sourced from the nature. Kitre, used to intensify the water, is a plant based primary material. The natural acid that helps dyes open over kitre (tragacanth) is the bile found in an animal's gall bladder.
Art of Water Marbling: “Art of Turkish Paper Decoration” was registered to UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanityon behalf of Turkey in 2014.
Examples of the works of our artists;
The artists performing the art of marbling in the Bazaar of Istanbul Arts are as follows:
Uğur Taşatan
Uğur Taşatan was born in Istanbul in 1982. After graduating from Capa High School, he graduated from Istanbul University Faculty of Law in 2006. In 2019, he completed his master's degree at Marmara University, Institute of Turkic Studies, Department of Turkish Art, with his thesis on "Mustafa Duzgunman Marblings in the Suleymaniye Library Marbling Collection".
He met marbling while he was a university student in 2001. On November 18, 2012, he received the permission from his teacher, Alparslan Babaoğlu, on teaching and performing marbling. He is still in contact with his teacher and continues his studies on Turkish marbling.
He won the first prize in the field of Flower Marbling at the Traditional Turkish Marbling Contest organized in memory of Mustafa Duzgunman in 2010.
He has participated in more than thirty group exhibitions and made presentations on marbling at various universities and high schools, including Marmara University and Istanbul High School. He organized commemoration programs and exhibitions in honor of Mustafa Duzgunman, Necmeddin Okyay and Edhem Efendi.
