News أخبارنا — art

RICHARD HENRY This pierced stone screen at the mosque of Ibn Tulun, Cairo, produced in the ninth century CE, sets a biomorphic, leaf design at the center of each 12-pointed star. For our next journey into the art of Islamic patterns, we visit Marrakesh, Morocco, where we find a stunning carved stucco design on a wall in the Qasr al-Bahiyah. The design is framed within a niche topped by muqarnas, the characteristic stalactite-like forms that often articulate the transition from a wall to a dome, a vault or, as in this beautiful example, the upper span of an interior niche....

“It’s important that each message speaks to the local community but also has a universal significance,” says eL Seed, who last year on a facade of the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston, Texas, translated into Arabic and rendered into calligraffiti a quote from city founder Sam Houston: “Knowledge is the food of genius, and my son, let no opportunity escape you to treasure up knowledge.”  EL SEED SPOKE BY PHONE FROM HIS DUBAI STUDIO.  An interview by Johnny Hanson, originally appeared in the July/August 2017 AramcoWorld magazine.    Let’s start with “calligraffiti.” There are quite a...

Learning from the Pattern-Masters from AramcoWorld on Vimeo.   Walls, windows, doors and satellite dishes tessellate at twilight into a patchwork pattern in the madinah, or walled old city, of Fez, Morocco, as a pedestrian passes into view along one of the city’s typically narrow stone streets. Nestled in a valley crowned by gentle hills, Fez is one of the Islamic world’s great historic centers of the art of geometrically based patterns executed in tile, plaster, stone, wood and metal. Like all such patterns, those that adorn the mosques, madrassahs (schools) and sabeels (fountains) of Fez have their origins in...