I was enthralled by this Uzbek woman, photo circa 1880's. Her sheer attitude is invigorating - she is her own Power Source. With utter certainty, she projects strength and self-reliance. She is saying, I have work to do, so don't bother me with trivialities, or you may find more trouble than you came here with.
I am not consciously aware of the full energetic impact of what I'm constructing, which is why coming back later with my 'rational mind' and dissecting the images has become valuable to me. The construction process is intuitively led -- I am looking only for the resonance of images (especially those that are seemingly unrelated) to find a harmony with each other, such that the final result causes your eye to wander inside the panel without getting stuck anywhere. All this takes place at a non-verbal level; it's aesthetically directed.
So the first thing I realized here is, what, where and why is Uzbekistan?
That question led me on quite an internal journey. And I've found several reasons now why I would love to visit there.
I am so drawn to their art. Among the images in the April panel are an Uzbek carpet (only a small slice of it remains, in the title section upper left);
....the prized blue ceramics, for which the Uzbeks are famously known;
...the work in silver, turquoise and carnelian
...to die for.
It turns out that the Uzbeks had extraordinary skill with textiles. Their silk embroidery is enchanting, especially some of the antique work from nomadic tribal people known as the Lakai. The background fabric of felt is the canvas for the embroidery.
Their excellent facility with silk embroidery makes perfect sense, as the Uzbekistan cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva were all stops on the Silk Road.
They even have a tradition of Ikat - a process of tye-dying the threads of the fabric before weaving it, a technique that I previously thought of as exclusive to Japanese culture. This is the only other cultural context in which I have encountered Ikat.
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| Uzbek IKAT |
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| Uzbek woman in Ikat coat....with pomegranate |
Uzbekistan is in Central Asia, basically. Its temperatures normally range between 104 °F (40 °C) in the summers to 28 °F in the winters, although it can go as low as −40: the dreaded temperature where Centigrade and Fahrenheit get married.
This isn't much different from Colorado, actually. The coldest I've experienced here was -36 °F, at a gig in Steamboat Springs. All the locals were rejoicing that they had beat out another local town for the coldest temperature that night. I thought them quite mad to celebrate this as a triumph.
Like Colorado, it's landlocked. Even the five countries that border it are landlocked: Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, with whom it shares an immense high desert called the Qizilqum ("red sand" ....hmmm...as in The Color-Redo).
But it was when I got to the subject of those horses that the real inner journey took me to unexpected destinations. Such treasures poured forth from those horses that I can't even do justice to it here; they will require their own post (pardon the pun, which only functions for those familiar with horse racing).
So ... I must go to Uzbekistan at my first opportunity, hopefully via the Orient Express, to get my boots,
my Chapan (coat),
my okbosh (wall hanging),
my carpet,
along with my blue ceramic kitchen wares and my carnelian jewelry. When everything is situated properly in my yurt,
I'll send you a postcard to come visit.
How long it will take me to accomplish this is not known. Until then, steppe by steppe, slowly I turned.
