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Ceramist,
Exhibits at Darat Al Funun Darat Al Funun houses
today an exhibition of the ceramic works of Mahmoud
Taha, a leading Jordanian ceramist and connoisseur
in the art of Arab calligraphy who is renowned in
the Arab world and abroad. The exhibition includes
murals, flasks, glazed pottery and ceramic
sculpture, all bearing calligraphy as well as
regional motifs derived from architecture and
crafts.
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Pioneers
of Jordan:
Mahmoud Taha
By
Nelly Lama
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In the 1950's, Taha started working in Amman as a
calligrapher, making signs and receiving various calligraphy
commissions. In the early sixties, he went to the university
of Baghdad to study ceramics and ceramic sculpture, and was
awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1968. In the years
1975-76 he joined the Cardiff College of art in Wales, U.K.,
studying the British ceramic movement of the past 50 years.
Back home, Mahmoud Taha opened his own studio for ceramics,
ceramic sculpture and calligraphy. His studio has become a
haven for foreign calligraphers who wish to learn about the
art of Arab calligraphy.
Mahmoud Taha also teaches this subject in Jordanian schools.
He has lectured about the subject in different parts of the
world. He has tried his hand at silk screen printing,
marbling and all media pertaining to calligraphy, but prefer
to work directly in ink with a reed pen of his own making,
in the original Arab way.
He works clay in many ways: The coil method and wheel
throwing for his jars, amphorae, plates and sculpture in the
round. He uses the slab method for his murals including low
and sunken relief. As for glazes, he has devised his own
formulae to create special effects and develop different
colors and shades reminiscent of those used in Samarra and
Fostat (prosperous centers of ceramics in Islamic history).
He often renders smooth color-glazed areas in low relief
standing against a rough background. He sometimes introduces
a painterly finish that is quite alien to Islamic ceramics.
This finish gives the work a more contemporary feel,
averting the commercial effect of ceramic glazed tiles.
As for the use of calligraphy in these works, there is
mainly no literal meaning to the calligraphy he uses. "It is
rather the letter itself (or the combination of letters )
that is the subject matter. It exists as an abstract form,
as a decorative whole." The letter becomes a unit or number
of intertwining units placed within the bounds of
architectural motifs like monumental arches. The ways in
which he applies calligraphy to his ceramic forms is
interesting. He uses various methods and techniques: Making
impressions in the surface to produce a sunken relief, or
delineating the edges of his letters with edges of his
letters with etching and filling them in with paint as he
does on his monumental flattened flasks. He often builds up
surfaces to create calligraphy in relief, or simply lets the
letters appear in a lower layer of paint that is left
apparent in an overlay ( a second coat of colored glaze
).
Mahmoud does not make preliminary sketches and follow them
literally as other artists do. His composition develops as
he works.
Although his style is easily recognizable, Taha is in
constant search for new elements. In the 70s Taha started
working on murals where he tackled national themes as well
as world issues such as anti-racism in South Africa. Soon,
Islamic architectural motifs, both Umayyad and Abbasid,
found their way into his work. One could recognize in his
work decorative motifs pertaining to other Islamic applied
arts such as woodwork, metals, plaster stucco, textile
weaving and embroidery motifs including geometric
intertwining forms or floral and foliate motifs.
Taha plays around with textures; he moves from the smooth
and flat to the mottled, from the scarred to the emaciated.
A pronounced development can be seen in his globes where
texture goes out of bounds in its ruggedness. These globes
that carried, in his early phase, human figures representing
the destruction and burning of Beirut, and all the pain and
torture that went with it, now seem to foam out as if with
magma recreating earth forms, natural growths, crevices,
tortuous formations. According to Taha, this is due to the
use of different clays where one has a higher shrinkage
potential than the other.
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