JOURNEY IN CREATIVITY

Approximately ten years after the weaving experiment in Old Cairo began, Ramses and Sophie took their work even further. In 1951, the purchase of about three-quarters of an acre of land on the outskirts of the village of Harrnia marked the beginning of the next phase. Each week Ramses and Sophie went out to the countryside. It was on such excursions that the village children first came to see them and play with them. In this way, Ramses and Sophie ultimately established a good relationship with their young friends. After two years, Ramses asked the children if they would like to learn to weave, and to this they agreed wholeheartedly.

In preparation, simple weaving frames were made by a carpenter and strung with threads of local wool colored with Ramses' own natural dyes. Indigo was used for blues; cochineal and madder for reds; and weld and 'reseda luteola' for yellows and greens. Two of the original students from the school in Old Cairo were brought to the centre each week to teach the children. Within a year all of them had learnt to weave, allowing the older weavers to return to their own looms.

It was at this point in the experiment that Ramses was able to carefully observe the children and to set down guidelines for their future work. Steady contact with the young weavers brought details of the craft to his attention. Here, he describes the tapestry as it comes into creation.

"To produce an image in a tapestry, weft-threads of various colors are woven into the warp, which forms the working surface. The background and the design must be in different shades, and they have to be assembled thread by thread, in such a way that the design fits into the spaces in the background, without leaving any gaps. This is a very slow task, rather like the generation of living tissues. I attached great importance to this slowness, and to the child's ideas ripening in his mind and guiding his fingers as they materialized. I also counted on experience, gained gradually day by day, giving birth continually to new images."

Ramses goes on to explain the children's abilities in the following way, "The sense of color and rhythm, the instinctive feeling for the play of shapes and composition are the innate gifts of the child. These will atrophy and die if they are not brought into action." In order to prevent this from happening to his weavers, Ramses gave three rules which he strictly observed throughout the work. The first one was "no cartoons or drawings." This rule sprang from his belief that making a model or a pattern for a work of art, with the intention of transferring it to a medium that was considered difficult, meant evading the

difficulty, splitting the act of creation into two stages, and resigning oneself to the impossibility of ever creating a real work of art. He was convinced rather; that only the risk involved in creating directly in the material itself could provide and channel the creative effort.

"No external aesthetic influences," was rule number two. During the course of the experiment Ramses took great care not to provide the children with works of art to imitate, nor did he ever take them to visit museums or art galleries. It was his contention that, "Adopting someone else's feelings and attitudes, or yielding to his influences means a loss of contact with one's own emotions." He further added, "The inspiration so often sought from great masters, or from those praised by critics, has never been a cure for mediocrity, but frequently been its cause." As Ramses observed, the children showed far too much of their own inventiveness for it to be necessary to show them anything to copy.

The third rule given was "no criticisms or interference from adults." Because Wissa Wassef considered adult criticism as a crippling intrusion on a child's imagination, no criticism whatsoever was tolerated. In the closed environment of the atelier, each child was free to work at whatever came to his or her mind. In this way the young weavers were able to develop confidence in their work, and to depend solely on their own imaginations.

With these three rules and Ramses as their guide, he and the children took off on their journey in creativity. Within a few years time, it was evident that his experiment was more than a success. In its own quiet way, it had revealed that methods other than those used by modern education could be used with astonishing results. Here, Ramses' own words best sum up his point of view.

Modern education starts by smothering the child's potentialities, and then, when it is too late, it tries to inject some life into what has managed to survive the earlier treatment…In contrast, my point of view is that one must use the child's own forces to educate him, starting at the moment when they are still strong, and protecting them so that they can effect and lead to actions that will become an integral and useful part of his life.