Mosaic is the art of connecting broken pieces to form a new design. I use mosaics to connect with the countries I live in, practising and teaching the art to those around me, to connect with people and enable others to connect with each other.
It was pretty quiet in terms of mosaic moments in June. Still living in a serviced apartment I immersed into studying Chinese with my wonderful teacher Ling. This language is so illustrative and it brings me immense pleasure to discover the construction of some words – like woods is the characters of 2 trees and forest are the characters of 3 trees. Yesterday I could buy a pair of trainers all in Chinese, speaking about the size, stating which color I like and which not, asking for the price and understanding the numbers! Every small situation when I understand a person or manage to make myself understood lets me jubilate.
Not that I am very advanced: the day before yesterday I took a DIDI which means younger brother in Chinese – the equivalent to Uber in China). The driver was very friendly and talkative. When I told him I am from Germany he started to give me a long talk about something with Germany and USA and food – Chi (in Chinese). My imagination run wild that he was talking about the western style of eating and that we bring bad unhealthy food to China. When we stoped at a red light behind a Mercedes, he exclaimed “Ben – Che” and pointed to the Mercedes Star. And then it dawned to me that of course he was not speaking so agitated about food – Chi but about cars – Che! Germany – Mercedes – “Ben-Che”!
Studying Chinese and exploring the city of Beijing gave me enough distraction whilst waiting impatient for the apartment to become free. Beijing is a world class city. We heard already renowned orchestras from Germany, Switzerland and Hungary in the fantastic National Centre of Performing Arts, listened to classic Jazz, strolled through the lush green parks and sit almost every night in our local Italian restaurant enjoying the hot&dry evening winds. I joined three excursions on Chinese traditional food to the small winding streets of the old city and reluctantly stepped into the clinically clean bakery shop of Holiland, to buy my Sunday piece of cake which to my surprise are very yummy, vanillin fragrant, heavenly soft baked goods in much state of the art packaging.
Fotos from the National Centre of Performing Art and tile design in Ritan Park.
In my March blog I told you about the stock of material that miraculously found its way to me here. Two weeks ago I went to my friend Sanny’s house who secured the stock for me in her garage and did a day of sorting and stock taking. These are the samples of the material I have. A pretty colorful mix, not a lot of everything but a good reference for what is available here from the Taobao Internet shopping platform. They are mainly glass tiles in many variations and colors: opaque, glossy, in tinted mirror, in glitter, metallic, with and without pattern and ceramic and natural stone too. An amazing variety!
My senses loved to discover colors, touch surfaces, measure hight, and ideas started to develop what type of mosaic could derive from all this. I can not wait to have my workshop back! Coming weekend we will move into our new home where the attic will become my new reign. I sooo much look forward to this.
Since 3 years I am a member of the Society of American Mosaic Artists – SAMA. SAMA has around 900 members including mosaic artists at all levels, mosaic aficionados, collectors, materials suppliers, and art educators and is almost entirely run by volunteers .
One of the activities SAMA is organizing is a yearly conference that brings members together, through exhibitions, workshops, auctions, tours and simple living together during an entire week. At the same time SAMA educates the public about mosaics through exhibiting mosaic art in the respective city where the conference takes place. This year the conference was held April 23-28 in Nashville/Tennessee.
The mosaic exhibitions
Mosaic art works were exhibited in three important public buildings of the city of Nashville during January – May 2019.
Architectural&community mosaics at the Public Library,
Fine art mosaics and “one hundred moments in mosaic’ at the Parthenon building – yes Nashville has a one to one replica of Athens Parthenon! –
and an exhibition of 5 renowned mosaic artists at the Vanderbilt Universities Fine Art Gallery. I will give you some photos of my favorite works of the three exhibitions.
The community mosaic “Athos meets Gaudi” that I created with the staff of UNDP for the UN Building in Brasilia was selected for the show of architectural mosaic art at the main building of the Public Library of Nashville. Arriving in Nashville on April 22 the huge classicistic building of the Library in the centre of town was our first destination. (My friend Miriam and I did a road trip from Detroit to Nashville, driving trough blue grass and country music territory). Nineteen mosaics applied to architectural surfaces were shown in the gallery of the main hall of the library. As you could not bring the projects themselves to the exhibition, each project was presented in a poster and a screen that displayed more photos (iPad format). Some projects had examples of work, sketches, tools etc presented in large glass vitrines on two sides of the gallery.
Me in front of the board that shows the “Athos meets Gaudi” mosaic mural at the SAMA conference exhibition in Nashville , April 2019
Models of the mosaic tiles on show at Public library Nashville during SAMA mosaic exhibition February till June 2019
I was impressed by the exhibition design and dedication of the curators to convey to the public a lot of information about all this very interesting projects being realized as commissions in different places of the world.
I can really recommend you to look at Kathleen Crocetti’s “Celebrating Diversity of Labor” community mosaic project involving immigrants communities in the design of 16 mosaic medallions inserted into the pavement of the main street of Watsonville, California. This project was chosen as the best community mosaic project for this exhibition.
The Parthenon in Nashville/TN – kind of classy that the fine art mosaics where displayed in an architectural setting that ages ago they belonged to.
The Fine art mosaics exhibition was in the centre of the exhibition space at the Parthenon. 38 mosaic works were presented. These mosaic art pieces were produced from many different materials, as it is the beauty in mosaic to have this sheer endless variety of materials to create with. Reading through the artists statements it struck me that all of them were inspired by a concern over environment – being it nature or social.
On Wednesday evening during the conference we could visit all three exhibition spaces with a hop- on- hop- off bus that toured between them and the hotel.
At the fine arts exhibition we all stood somewhat awed trying to figure out meaning and techniques whilst speaking to the artists present amongst us but when people entered the back room with the exhibition of “one hundred moments in mosaics”, the spirit shifted to expressions of pure joy of these adorable small creations.
These mosaics were created for exhibition just using the same size frame (15×15 cm) as a uniting element of all projects. Experiencing this I would like my mosaics to create moments of joy rather then awe and heavy thinking.
At the third exhibition venue, the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, 5 renowned mosaic artists: Atsuko Laskaris, California; Lilian Broca, Canada; Shug Jones, Texas; Michael Kruzich, California; Carol Shelkin, Pennsylvania could show their works between March and May 2019. Yes these are clearly masters of their techniques. Some of the projects measuring between 1-2m in length and width.
Michael Kruzich
Carol Shelkin
Lilian Broca
Shug Jones
The conference
During the conference, which lasted from Tuesday to Sunday, one could choose from almost 20 workshops, attend about 10 lectures, go to three mosaic exhibitions, buy mosaic tools and material from 20 different vendors and acquire mosaics of a famos artist in an auction, attend the General meeting and network with more than 300 other mosaic makers from all over the US, Canada, Puerto Rico and Brazil !
And a nice activity one could always drop in was the SAMA community mosaic. As always, it was refreshing during all the talks and chats to sit in a room with others concentrating making mosaic. I really thank Jairo and Suzan Prado who were the organizers of this community mosaic work to provide us with this opportunity.
On the makers side I participated in two workshops: cement carving with Elder Jones and Picasette in Portraiture with Gila Rayberg. In the cement carving class
We mixed cement and sand and water
and filled it in cylindrical molds.
After 2h drying time
the cement is hard enough to keep the form of the mold
but soft enough to be carved.
At the portraiture class we learned how to use parts of dishes in portraiture. The technique using dishes in mosaic is called Picassiette. I never regarded this as a very artistic material but Gila Raysberg convinced me of taking this technique into consideration for my own work.
At the Picassette portraiture class Gila introduced to seeing shapes in dishes that resemble areas in a face. It was fascinating how you can use every part of a dish for creating lines and shapes!
made out of this one plate!
Can you recognize the part used for the ear?
At the weekend one could attend lectures. All of them were very interesting topics – on Friday more around promoting our mosaic works and on Saturday 3 very interesting portraits of houses decorated with mosaic and the people behind it. If you are interested check out:
In Detroit my dear friend Miriam Engstrom, psychologist, singer and actor, who I met at our posting in Ankara, showed me around this incredible interesting city. Miriam is from a three generation Detroit family – so she took me to the place her grandmother worked in.
The red brick building is the Guardian building (built 1928-29), the so called “Cathedral of finance” – an art deco office tower in downtown Detroit.
Inside the Guardian Building – colorful tiled comb structured vaults by Rookhook Ceramics (later restored by Pewabic Pottery) and cast iron gateEdit
Miriam in the main public hall. The ceiling is not brick – its canvas made out of horse hair painted in order to keep the sound low in this bank hall.
Later we visited the Pewabic Pottery established by Mary Chase Perry Stratton in the early 1900 in Detroit. The pottery workshop is one of the few renowned ceramic manufacturers in the US until today.
One of Pewabic potteries kiln.
Standing on Pewabic tiles.
The pottery developed in swing with the arts and crafts movement in America as in Europe at the beginning of the 20st century. As Mary C. Stratton Perry came from a fine art degree and a career in painting china, she started making vessels. Later she became more and more a ceramic artist and fabricant for ceramic tiles and mosaic style art for architectural surfaces. In Detroit there are eight public buildings that hold the work of Pewabic Pottery architectural art. One of it is the Guardian building described above. Not only is Pewabic Pottery known in Detroit. The Crypt in the Basilica of the Shrine in Washington DC, of its mosaics I wrote about in the previous blog, is decorated with Pewabic tile mosaic designed by Mary Stratton. This commission was carried out between 1925-31 and is seen as Mary Strattons pinnacle in her career as a ceramicist.
A visit to the studio of German Artist Birgit Huttemann – Holz provided for continuation in visiting female artists work in Detroit. Birgit works with encaustic painting and gave us a demonstration in her rather refined technique of encaustic printing. I was impressed by her work and her spacious studio which she rents for a rather cheap price in a former industrial building. This is Detroit for you!
And Detroit although still suffering from high unemployment, failing education and race related social problems is developing new cool urban areas with fine restaurants, bars, art and crafts shops. One is the Eastern Market area. There we found the real street art – not only in graffiti but also in mosaic!
