…. it is overwhelming what support and interest I find in my quest to get THE MATERIAL..
First I have to thank my friend Kay, her daughters Nora and Phoebe and my splendid daughter Hillary for helping to roughly count the tesserae by color to get an idea how much STONE I need of each color.
For this I made a color scheme and then these darlings spent several hours of their precious holiday crouching over the full size print out which was spread on the floor in our holiday house….
The color scheme with 13 primary color,but each stone of one color comes in different shades
In mosaic restoration class which I attended last year at the Conservation- and Restoration school of Ankara University we learned to take an average weight for 1 tesserae, to get somewhat of an idea about how much of each color we would need. I took 4g per tesserae and it will be 56 kg for the total mosaic!
Then, one morning, I set off early to Balikesir, 100 km east of Ayvalik to 3 marble dealers. I was tipped off to one of them by Evren Bey from Turanbekisoglu marble quarry in Sivrihisar, which I visited on the way to Ayvalik with Hillary.
poor sick Hillary was dragged around the marble factory by her crazy mum
After getting carried away in the beautiful curves through the hills on the phantastic road between Edremit and Balikesir I went to Assos Marble, where I was met and led around their vast field of marble stock by Baris Bey a young man who speaks fluent English, further I went to Verona Marble which had just done a mosaic of the largest carpet in the world
There I was helped by Ali Isan Basöz, an extremely well English spoken sales man, who is part of the sales team that speaks Russian, German, French, Italian and English as foreign languages – impressive to find this in such a small town like Balikesir!
In both places I found most of the colors in marble and got them basically for free after showing my design and enthusiasm for THE MOSAIC.
2 days later I had them cut into 5cm sticks ready to be transported to Gaziantep in a crate
at Ayvalik Marble Atelier
look at these beautiful colors
Just a light green was missing – so on the way back to Ankara, my friend Miriam had to be dragged too through marble dealers in Bursa and Gemlik ( on the Marmara Sea) – where we finally found IT – the light green – “Usak Yesil”
