How to Find Inspiration on a Nomad Rug
A carpet surfs on the wind toward the glowing desert dusk sky. Such image tells the story of nomadic tribes, who live free and wander in deserts chasing the sun and the morning star, collecting ivory colors and silence in the fields of gold dust. It seems like they, currently there are over 40 million nomads in the world, have embraced their childish self and found everlasting beauty in the way how their primordial ancestors have once tasted the ending life and the world.
“Be in this world like a stranger or a wayfarer,” is what the prophet taught to his followers, and they followed.
Nomads continue to follow this advice and roam their waterless world in search of life and other things only they know and few can understand. Just like when Jackson Bentley asked Major Lawrence at ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ about what attracted him to the desert and he answered: “It’s clean.”
The desert is clean and pure in the way that’s pure the sense that gives a nomadic rug under the barefoot of someone that lives in cold and freezing country far away from the place where it has been weaved. For sure it hides desert sand underneath and mystery from oriental nights. If one lays on a nomad rug and put the ear close down to it, he will hear and see dark skinned girls dancing around burning fires. All these emotions stay hidden in the symmetry of geometric motifs.
It takes a tribe and the knowledge of all the generations that have come and gone to make a nomad carpet. The world used by ancient Greeks: “Live as though all your ancestors were living again through you,” is enough for explaining the knowledge that these people share when they weave a carpet or rug.
There are thousands of tribes that make carpets for their own needs and for the pleasure of the eyes of people that are yearning for a piece of oriental art in their houses or collections. There is something archaic in every rug made by nomad tribes. Although they travel and their motifs get sometimes melted with foreign shapes and designs, the identity of the nomad rug never gets lost. On the other hand, they get richer in colors and purity.
