While I'm Not Being An Artist

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During my mosaic sabbatical, I've been so very busy not being an artist. I hope to have installment #7 in my Before I Was An Artist series out in the next few days. So, what have I been up to?

Still cooking, literally, and so thoroughly enjoying it! How fabulous! How could I have gotten into my mid-late 50s and just be discovering how satisfying it is to be acquiring some kitchen competence? For the last 3+ weeks I have been focusing on vegan dinners because my husband is doing that very long Easter fast; Orthodox Easter is still about 4 weeks away. So I've been pretty much vegan myself, using a bit of dairy and eggs. I'm discovering great vegan substitutes and learning some things. We have not suffered in the least.

I'm enjoying my two grandsons immensely, one 2 and one 4. We had an Easter Egg Hunt here for them on Easter afternoon. Sean, the 4-year-old, and his Mom had decorated 11 hardboiled eggs for the hunt and also brought some of those plastic eggs with a chocolate treat inside each. My daughter and son-in-law hid the eggs around the property—in the woods and garden and yard. I accompanied Sean on the hunt and when we came upon one of the decorated eggs, he would just walk right by and say "Those aren't the kind of eggs I'm looking for." He would only pick up the plastic ones with the candy inside. A no-nonsense kind of fellow!

There is progress on the renovation front! We have finalized our plans and the construction will start any day now. I'm so excited about my new studio, which makes perfect sense for someone who is trying not to be an artist. Well, I'll take some pics as the project progresses. 

Another thing I've been doing while I'm not being an artist is to work on that 6-year-old mosaic that I wrote about some weeks ago (see here). Yes, it is very strange that someone who is on a mosaic sabbatical and not making art would spend time finishing a mosaic. But I've been spending time here and there working on this thing. If you recall, I had to do a sort of reset on it after having somehow wandered away from the original concept. 

To refresh your memory, I've reposted the pics from my earlier post. 

Rough drawing of the 30" x 30" very simple, repeating pattern. It is basically 9 squares, each 9" x 9", with an approx. 1.5" border around the edge.

Rough drawing of the 30" x 30" very simple, repeating pattern. It is basically 9 squares, each 9" x 9", with an approx. 1.5" border around the edge.

Original work done on one of the 9" squares, which I concluded was the wrong approach some 6+ years ago.

Original work done on one of the 9" squares, which I concluded was the wrong approach some 6+ years ago.

Back in February, I scraped off the original attempt and repaired the substrate, which you can see in the lower left corner of the image below. Then I spent a few weeks getting things ready for the new direction, repainting the sides of the gold lines, cutting marble, etc. Finally, I started working on it an hour here, a couple of hours there, some days not at all, really trying not to get too absorbed in it.

You can see that I've got quite a reset going on here. I chose a dark background with red for the sides of the lines to boldly exploit the basic concept.

I've got the contrast that I needed for the repeating pattern of gold lines, and the red sides of the lines really stand out when changing viewing perspective. 

I'm leaving a gap, almost 1/8", between all the implied triangles within the 9 squares, creating shadow lines which both connect and separate as they define squares, triangles, and diamond shapes.

It's really a very simple design, isn't it?

I'm getting some great practice using the hammer, cutting the marble into the roughly 1/4" square pieces, although I am using nippers to shape them up and cut the diagonals. Still, my right hand is fine and seems to have recovered from my injury last spring. 

Below are a couple of detail shots on which you can click to zoom. 

It's quite a tedious project and, at this point, not much more than a technical challenge. But, in that sense, it seems a good fit for me at this time. I need to be making something and working with my hands. I think I'll actually get this finished, eventually, probably this year. And I think I'll like it, and I will be happy that I did not give up on it. 

And that's a worthy goal, don't you think? Whatever you're making, and whether or not you're an artist. Just to like what you make and be happy that you made it. 

Before I Was An Artist, #5

Do you have trouble fitting into the label of artist? It feels quite natural for some people, but it has never felt like it fit me. 

As useful as labels are for us human beings, I've always been challenged to own a label but not identify with it. My idea of, and relationship to, the label of artist needs some work. And I may be onto something.

Thoughts on being fearless...

In my first years of mosaic-making, I was fearlessly ambitious, the way that a child is fearlessly ambitious. They have no fear because they don't know to be afraid. It's that ignorance of bliss, Garden of Eden kind of fearless. The unknowns are unknown, not even suspected. What a wonderful place from which to operate!  Children accomplish astonishing growth and mastery in their first few years of life, of which no small part must be due to being free of fear. 

As an adult, is it possible to truly be fearless? We talk about feeling the fear and doing it anyway, but I'd rather not feel it - not as it regards making mosaics. (Being uncomfortable identifying as an artist, I'll also refrain from saying that I make art. I'll just be a mosaicist and say that I make mosaics.) In trying to free myself of the artist label, to un-become an artist, I realize that I am really just trying to find a way to be fearless again.

“We carry real and imagined critics with us constantly—a veritable babble of voices, some remembered, some prophesied, and each eager to comment on all we do. Beyond that, even society’s general notions about artmaking confront the artist with paralyzing contradictions... You’re expected to make art that’s intimately (perhaps even painfully) personal—yet alluring and easily grasped by an audience that has likely never known you personally.

When the work goes well, we keep such inner distractions at bay, but in times of uncertainty or need, we begin listening. We abdicate artistic decision-making to others when we fear that the work itself will not bring us the understanding, acceptance and approval we seek.”
— David Bayles & Ted Orland, Art & fear

Of course, it's not really about the label itself—although I recognize that it's quite a loaded idea to me, or whether what I am making is or is not art—as that is not for me to decide. It's about how my relationship to mosaic-making changed as I started thinking in terms of being an artist and of making art. And it's not as though it was, in and of itself, a bad thing. It wasn't. Until it was. And it was necessary. Until it wasn't. 

Well, I just needed to wander off and ponder fearlessness. I'll go back to the early to mid-2000s in my next post, which would lead me out of the blissful ignorance of my small private mosaic world and into the public world of the blossoming mosaic community.




Before I Was An Artist, #4

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Circa 1997. I was pretty obsessed with mosaic. I saw mosaic everywhere. Either something could be transformed by mosaic, or it could be broken up and used for mosaic material. I wasn't an artist; mosaic was just an obsessive hobby. 

After my first birdbath, I decided that I would just make birdbaths - for forever. I made two more, and realized that forever had come not soon enough. I was ready to not make anymore birdbaths. I resumed my exploration of material and style via primarily decorative pieces. 

Stained glass caught my attention. It was relatively easy to find, to cut, and it was inexpensive. It was at a stained glass shop that I first found wheeled nippers. Wow! What an invention. I took a few stained glass classes to learn how to cut glass and I was off in that direction for a while, trying a lot of glass-on-glass stuff, certain that I would do that for the rest of my life.

There was my picassiette phase. I loved the chunkiness and mixed patterns of broken dishes and ceramics. Yes, I bought things just to break them up for material. Playing with picassiette led me to bottles, which still hold a bit of interest for me. 

By around 2000, I started focusing a bit more in the wall panel direction and ventured to make a few largish ones, one being a portrait for which I was woefully inadequate. But it never occurred to me that I did not know what I was doing, so I gave it a shot.

Fearlessly ambitious and deficient in both self-doubt and expertise from which to judge my success, I enthusiastically charged ahead. Though accomplishing much more technically than artistically, due to the sheer act of physically doing it, my ability to assess my own work was quite limited. While books offered a few tips and critiques, I was mostly oblivious to my technical errors. Still, I was growing, in that unconscious way that is a by-product of just making one thing after another. It was unavoidable, I suppose, that I would slowly and quite by accident be likewise growing artistically, learning a bit about line, composition, perspective, and color.

Looking back, I see that I was very content to just be making things. But then, my mosaic world was quite small. It was just me. I was not part of any mosaic community. SAMA was not in existence until 1998 or so, and there was no Facebook or CMA (not sure when MAO was formed). I was probably still ordering tiles by phone, although I recall the perfect joy of spending time in local tile stores and home improvement stores like the no longer Builder's Square. What fun!

My, how things would change in the next decade! Suppliers would be online, and the internet would be bringing the work of mosaicists from all over the world into my own home, my own studio. 

Before I Was An Artist, #3

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Yes, so, what happened last week...

With the holidays well behind me and the adult kids back to their lives, the house was quiet again. I decided it was time to clean my studio, which had become rather piled up with remnants of the Thomas decorations - spray paint, axles and wheels that I made out of hardware for the snack train, railroad track cutouts, etc., a couple of wood specimens in need of some preservation, shale specimens that I was... am... continuing to collect from our woods when out with the dog - basically, just stuff, the kind of stuff that seems to pile up. 

While cleaning I came across 5 unfinished mosaics that I was confronting for not at all the first time. The oldest one was from 6 years ago and, although I muddled the idea of it early in its execution, I could never give up on it. I thought it was a cool idea when I started it, and every time I found myself considering what to do about it, I still thought it was a cool idea. Last year, I decided to either come up with a way to make this cool idea work or give up on it and throw the dang thing away. So I rethought it and came up with a reset plan. Unfortunately, it was about the time that I was running out of mosaic fuel so I turned my back on it yet again.

 

So here it is at right, my 6 year old neglected concept. A simple repeating pattern of lines in a grid of 9" x 9" squares - beautifully geometric, implying all those triangles and teasing other angular shapes. Just my kind of thing. The lines are in bumpy gold, raised on thin wooden rods, so the gold lines will extend above the surface of the mosaic. The sides of the gold lines were painted (brown, hmm...), which I thought would give a lot of interest from different views and the bumpy gold would reflect those elegant lines.

For some mysterious reason, I proceeded to use a mix of light, neutral tess, cut very intricately (as you can see in the lower image), kind of like an overhead city view, with little crystals, shells, minerals imbedded. I got one of the 9 squares done like this, and then I think I got distracted with a big commission. By the time I was revisiting it, I realized that I had muddled the concept, needed more contrast, and there was no way in hell that I was going to do 30 square inches in that ridiculously intricate work. 

 

Click on image to zoom.

 

Last week, I decided that it still has potential to be a very striking work, just the kind of thing I would love, so it's a keeper. Two other of the 5 should also be finished, I concluded. One of the 5 should be abandoned - just tossed, and the last one should first be cannibalized for it's good mineral specimens and then abandoned. Will I actually finish any of the 3? I have no idea, but I do feel a spark of interest. 

I found myself puttering around in my studio in the following days, not for any length of time. It felt so good to be puttering in my studio. The idea of maybe doing something to contribute to that 6 year old mosaic reaching its glorious potential slowly started becoming less repulsive, then palatable, then, well, let's just see if I can get that stuff scraped off and then reassess the situation.

Over the weekend, I scraped and yanked the beautifully and intricately cut, and completely wrong, marble from the Wedi substrate, pulling up most of the fiberglass mesh and foam core along with it. I had doubled the Wedi, which was working to my advantage these 6 years later, and the damage was isolated to about a 9" square corner. I was able to salvage a lot of the foam, pieced it back into the hole, and secured it with Weldbond. After it dried, I finished patching with thin set. After sanding it down, it's almost good as new. I've got to change something else to accommodate my reset plan, and then I'll see if its time may have come.

Let's not get carried away. I'm still on sabbatical, although I may qualify it as a sabbatical from any new work. Although I have some ideas percolating - all because I finally went in to clean up my studio last week - I don't think I'm where I need to be to birth anything new. My head is not on straight yet. Mosaic just became so consuming, I feared more an escape than an expression. I don't want to get lost again. I don't want to do it for the wrong reasons. I don't want to make anything that doesn't truly need to be made.

But maybe I can finish something that needs to be finished... 

 

Before I Was An Artist, #1

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This is the first post in what I intend to be a series of posts reflecting on my journey to becoming, and un-becoming, an artist. Since Spring of 2015, when I decided to take a break from my work and sort out my relationship with it, I began the un-becoming leg of the journey, and I'm realizing that it actually has very little to do with mosaic-making.

In recent years, I've struggled under the weight of the artist label. I spent the first 45+ years of my life with no connection to the label whatsoever. I never thought of myself as an artist, nor did I have such a desire. I hardly considered myself a creative person at all. I did not even think about art very much, other than it being something decorative to support a room or an activity that children did for fun in school.

Somewhere around 1996 we began the adventure of building a house. In short order, we found ourselves watching HGTV on the weekends and getting all kinds of ideas. This is how I was introduced to mosaic in any serious, non-Pier 1 Imports sort of way. Some show on gardens of Barcelona led to me being convinced that I must have a mosaicked fireplace surround in what would be my husband's study in the new house.

So, that's how it started. One thing led to another, and I decided to try my hand at making a mosaic. Between my first rather pitiful attempt, at right (Why did I arrange those leaves like that? Why did I grout it with white non-sanded? God bless grout colorant.), and the fireplace, I dove right into the mosaic pool and made as many mosaics as I could figure how to make.

I bought and studied mosaic books from local bookstores. I figured out where to buy materials before they were all over the internet. I experimented with substrates and adhesives. I learned to cut with traditional tile nippers - I did not find wheeled nippers for a couple of years. I learned some things not to do. 

 

Sunflower. 2' x 2'. First mosaic attempt. 1995 - 1996. Ceramic and porcelain pool and floor tiles. 

Sunflower. 2' x 2'. First mosaic attempt. 1995 - 1996. Ceramic and porcelain pool and floor tiles. 

At left, my very first experiments with smalti, which I ordered by phone from Mountaintop Mosaics. I knew that I wanted to do the fireplace in smalti, but it took some time before I found some and was brave enough to use it. I combined the smalti with unglazed porcelain (bathroom tiles), some pool tile, and a bit of gold. Designs were inspired by some illustrations in a book. I was not yet a year into mosaicking.

 

About a year later, as we moved into our new home, I was convinced that I was the person to mosaic that fireplace surround. And I did. It turned out okay - quite well, actually, considering my experience level. It has its issues - how could it not? Funny, because when I look at it, I don't see its problems. When I look at it, I remember the person who took it on without any fear or insecurity - that person who wasn't an artist.

Tropical Fireplace Surround 1996-1997. Smalti, mosaic gold.

Below is a slideshow of a few of the things I made in that first year. The kitchen table originally had 4" x 4" white ceramic tiles and a light wood finish. Another example of me just jumping in without fear or even a second thought. I used mostly pool tiles and some off-white ceramic tiles that I bought from a local tile store. Once all pieces were glued, I proceeded to grout it with antique white grout. What a disaster! Fortunately, I found some grout colorant in the color Haystack which saved it. Well, it's not perfect, but we still use it in our kitchen.

As can be seen, I was not making anything all that spectacular - mostly decorative things for around the house and small wall panels inspired by others' designs. I relied somewhat heavily on stencils for the fireplace design. Well, this was all before I was an artist... and I was having a blast!

 

 

MESI Winners!

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Congratulations to Mindy Graber and Tracy Hodson as the MESI Scholarship winners! For the 2016 American Mosaic Summit, each will receive a full-registration and workshop of their choice.

Also, thanks to Krystie Rose Millich, an additional $1300 (more or less)  in expense $$ has been raised to assist with additional conference expenses. 

I am so looking forward to hearing back from them about their conference experience!

My Excellent Italian Adventure

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In early October, I was lucky enough - and smart enough, I dare say - to be part of Julie Richey's 2015 Mosaic Masterpieces Tour. We started in Rome, then went to Florence with a lovely stop at a Chianti winery for lunch, tour, and wine-tasting, then wrapped things up in Ravenna!

Here's a little photo album of some of my favorite pics:


Life is a Puzzle

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A friend of mine sent me this jigsaw puzzle for my birthday. She knows that I enjoy jigsaw puzzles (go figure!) and she made this for me on Shutterfly. 

It's quite fun to revisit these mosaics and piece them together in a different, and certainly easier, way than the manner in which they were originally executed. 

 

MOREcolor 2015 Exhibition

© 2015 In the Woods #1: Meandering 13.5" x 13.5" | 34 cm x 34 cm. Shale, mosaic gold, glass, porcelain

The opening of the MOREcolor 2015 Regional Juried Exhibition was last evening. This year is my first engagement with this exhibition which is coordinated by, and benefits, Oklahomans for Equality.

My family and I enjoyed the large and impressive exhibit of primarily paintings, and were astounded by the number of people who quickly filled the exhibition space. The event was very well-attended and there were already red dots to be seen on a few of the works.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see that one of my four mosaics accepted for this exhibition was awarded an Honorable Mention. How nice!

Songs from White Hole, continued

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Songs from White Hole #2: Tree Voices 3" x 3" | 8 cm x 8 cm. Marble, stone, mosaic gold

Songs from White Hole #2: Tree Voices 3" x 3" | 8 cm x 8 cm. Marble, stone, mosaic gold

Early in the year, I made about 10 3" x 3" substrates, partly because I knew that I would be doing something with the stones that my cousins collected last August, while we were at the White Hole Resort in Flippin, AR. 

I've been a bit slow to work on the little commemorative pieces, but I've now finished the second little mosaic. I've started the third, but mostly likely will not have it finished until later in June. 

As we would sit on the back porch of one of the cabins, along the river, the trees were full of birds that kept up a constant kind of chattering music. 

 

Loner — WIP

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A couple of posts ago, I told you about my new project that is inspired by a book project. You can find that post here. Here is an in-progress pic of that project.. 

Loner, in progress. 20" x 36" | 51 cm x 91 cm. Vitreous, travertine, marble, obsidian specimen, amazonite

I had not intended to include one of the obsidian specimens that was my brother's. Neither did I intend to have this mosaic be about him. But, that is just the direction that it has gone. 

Obviously, I am trying to make it look like a triptych. I've never tried this before. My plan is to apply some black thin-set around the edge and between the three sections. I'm also getting good practice with sdoppiamento, and cutting marble and travertine into thin squares and rectangles with the hammer.

This is a nice, peaceful project that feels like my brother. 

Songs from White Hole

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Songs from White Hole: Echo. 3" x 3" | 8 cm x 8cm. Marble, smalti, mosaic gold, stone. Hand-formed substrate.

Songs from White Hole: Echo. 3" x 3" | 8 cm x 8cm. Marble, smalti, mosaic gold, stone. Hand-formed substrate.

Last August found me in Flippin, AR, at the White Hole Resort. Yes, I said Flippin. My cousin's family has enjoyed an annual stay at this fishing resort along the White River for many years. In recent years, other family members have started joining in, and it has now become an unofficial family reunion, of sorts. 

Last year was my family's first time there, and it was a rather poignant time. My cousin had died unexpectedly in the spring and his presence was painfully missed. And, though we did not know it, this occasion would be the last time that any of us would see my younger brother who died, also unexpectedly, last October. 

A few of my cousins collected stones that called to them so that I could create something commemorating our time together. Here is the first one in the series.