another cloudy sunday... hmm...

in case you don't know... and in case you are interested, the orsoni prize deadline is june 15, this friday. i believe that this is the first orsoni prize, so i don't know much about how it will be handled. i would really like to see the entries, but i don't know if they will be displayed anywhere. i am guessing that the winning entry will be displayed somewhere, but they have not specified such details.

what i do know about it is that the award is quite nice, aside, or course, from the prestige of winning. my friend, ruth, and i had already decided to go to venice again for another mosaic course, hopefully a portraiture class in 2008, so winning a trip to venice would be very convenient!

fortunately, i just finished my vase, skin deep, and it qualifies for the contest. so, in addition to l'entrata and etude, i will submit the vase for the contest. i only have to wait 3 months (sept. 21) for the results. seems like a long time... maybe they are expecting a lot of submissions.

click on the pics to the right to see l'entrata, etude, and skin deep, respectively.

i met ruth in june 2006, in venice. we were roomates during the 2 week intensive orsoni mosaic master course that we attended. we were quick friends, and have stayed in touch ever since. In march, we were roomates again for the sama conference, and we had a great time!

ruth is very talented... i am so envious of her drawing ability! she can whip out a detailed drawing of anything in no time!... it is incrediible! she also paints, and about 3 years ago, she started doing mosaics. you can see her mosaic work on her website mosaicsbyruth.com.

here are a couple of her recent painting commissions. the first one is done on an ostrich egg that she brought back from south africa. enjoy!

this vase is really a lot of work! ... and it is just eating up the gold! i would guesstimate that when it is finished, it will have at least 3.5 to 4 kilos of gold on it!... or at least that is what i will have gone through. however, i think that i will finish in just a few days, so i am closing in on this one!

i seem to be in a gold frenzy... perhaps it is addictive... but it seems that most of my work this year has been with gold... and there is more to come...

i was not sure how the curve on the outside of the top of the vase would be dealt with. after doing one section (as seen in the first pic... the vase is upside down), and because of the thickness of the gold, i realized that i would have to use smaller pieces to get the interstices more uniform... you can see from the pic that the grout line would have been too wide, and therefore distracting... so i had to take a different route (which can be seen in the second pic, in which the vase is right-side up).

here are some more pics of carole's ingeniously creative ideas. she did the first two projects with plexi-glass and glass paints. on the interior doors, she also used some faux leading.

for the outside project, she wanted to screen the pool pump, as it is not very attractive. she already had the metal frame... it was one of those that had pot holders for flower pots... you know, the kind that hold pots so smal that they dry out by noon once summer gets rolling? well, she gave up on having a flowering screen, and came up with this idea. I love it!

also, i missed the garden orb on the previous post with carole's mosaics, so here it is.