My teachers for natural stone mosaics
8 years ago I designed, produced and laid a 4m2 floor mosaic in our vacation home in Ayvalik on the North Aegean coast. This work and my involvement with it brought me into contact with Turkish artists who taught me a lot and, from whom I learned how to work with natural stone and roman cement. My first teacher was Mustafa Salih Kamanlioglu. He runs a mosaic studio in Ankara. He taught me how to break natural stone into small pieces for mosaic (tesserae). My second master was Nusret Özdemir. He lives in Gaziantep, in the south east of Turkey and taught me how to assess field stones for mosaic suitability. I also learned from him how to break a tessera into a small tooth so that they can be placed closer together. A third teacher was Hande Kökten, who was the director of Ankara University’s School of Restoration Technicians at the time. Despite my limited Turkish, she admitted me to her lessons on the conversation of ancient mosaics. There I mainly learned how to …
