Mosaic Me a Story Mr. Monrow

CLASSES ARE OVER! Now I can get on with whatever I've been saying is more important than school. Like knitting. Or petting Mr. Monty-buns. Here are the remains of the day, the final pictures of my mosaics and then the rest of the classes'.

So those were mine. There was a bit of technical trouble with them but they're done and now I don't have to worry about them.

These are pictures of my classmate's mosaics.
Someone did a gourd, an idea that I don't think would have ever occurred to me.

Someone else did a mould of a pregnant belly and then mosaicked over the surface of the plaster. Apparently the woman whose bod. it was went into almost immediate labor once they were done. The piece was too big to bring to class but I thought the pictures were neat anyway.
Chick-chick CHICKEN

This piece was gorgeous. The woman who made it spent the entire quarter on it and I think the end result is stunning. It's a mosaic of her puppy, he's eleven weeks old today.

The light actually comes through on this one because the glass was glued onto plexi-glass so that Jen could hang it in her window.
This last piece was the most amazing work I think I've ever seen, let alone a student project. Noah is also in the Neon art class and works as a studio aide within the neon studio so he combined this mosaic of space with neon to make something truly amazing.
Detail around the sun.

The full piece. It's actually in three separate pieces but they're meant to be seen as one piece.
The Earth.
Peace and Uranus.

Or Pluto. Or Saturn. I can't remember which has the ring or rings.

The sun.
The whole piece from the opposite end.

The final presentations went well, but I'm glad it's over and I can get some sleep (I got about four hours of sleep because I still hadn't finished gluing tesserae onto my vase at 3 am this morning, let alone grouted the darn thing. But then, what is art without sleep deprivation?)

Ahhhh Language Barriers

I've been working pretty much non-stop for the last couple of days on mosaics, essays, evaluations. I'm sure all of this could have been avoided as far as the last-minute nature of my work, but then what's the point of having finals week if I'm not in a state of constant panic?

I found these videos in the ten seconds I had between mosaicking and falling asleep last night and they made everything seem much better.

The second video is not really work-safe but it's one of my past favorites. I love this series of commercials, I really do.

Plants, Water, Fishies and Pavilions... It Must be the Classical Chinese Garden!

For my Art of the Mosaic class our teacher had us go down to Portland for the day to take a tour of the Classical Chinese Garden in the city. It was a lovely day, warm and a little overcast but it didn't rain so even that was just fine. The gardens were a little tricky to find, but once I realized they were in the Chinatown part of the city (DUHHHH, but hey, I never claimed to be a genius), the rest was easy.

The garden was formed as a result of Portland's sister-city relationship with Suzhou, China. We gave them a rose garden, they gave us a traditional housing compound. Makes sense.

This was a bit of rock, one of many, that was hauled out of a lake bed in China and imported into the United States for the purposes of being used in this garden. The currents of this lake are strong enough that they wear away the stones in these unique patterns. The stone is called Taihu stone , and is now illegal to export from China because it is considered a national treasure.

After looking at the plant map for the gardens, I haven't been able to figure out what this flower is. It was in the L/K area but it doesn't sound like one of the plants listed. Oh well, it was my favorite plant, I think.

Our tour guide, she did a wonderful job and I think that if you go, it'd be worth it to take the tour. It should take about 45 minutes (ours took 2 hours) and gives a nice history to the area that you wouldn't otherwise get. Since the gardens are pretty small (.8 acres), going through the gardens on their own is quick work, and the tour forces you to slow down and see everything. There's alot crammed into this small area.

The moon gate.

This tree was wrapped around a rock, the whole thing reminded me of the mandrake root on Pan's Labyrinth.
Plum blossoms.
Pretty purple thing.

Part of the stream that fed the pond. The pond had a couple schools of goldfish that seemed very happy floating around.

The water fall next to the tea house where you can have tea. Next time I think I'll stop in.

I DO remember what these were called. These are paper flowers and they smelled sooo pretty.

And here are the mosaics the class came to see. I'm not sure how relavent the field trip was for the class but the gardens themselves were beautiful enough to make the two hour drive worth it.

All of these mosaics paved the pathways between pavilions, courtyards and around the pond. I think I'd like to do some of these whenever I get a house. I always like having moss grow on things, especially on pathways like these.

Mask

In my Art of the Mosaic class we had the option of making a mask in class and then mosaicing over the top of it for one of our three pieces. Optional!? Who WOULDN'T want to? As it turns out six of about twenty four of us actually wanted to. Everyone else was worried about their makeup. Which is ridiculous, but who am I to judge other people's ridiculousness? Anywho, here's my face, or what it is once it's been covered in plaster and then the plaster is removed. Same diff.

I think this is going to be very very cool.

Bitsies and Pieces.

The mosaic right NOW... no wait riiiigghhttt.... NOW! Yeah, right now.

Really I should be reading Moby Dick, but I'm not, so there.

Make Me a Mosaic Mister!

So I'm taking this class The Art of the Mosaic where, guess what? We make mosaics. This is the beginnings of the first of three pieces I have to do for class. I've never done a mosaic before so this is all new and I'm not sure how this'll turn out. Katherine broke my mug the other day and as luck would have it the colors match whatever it is I'm doing here so I think I'm going to cannibalize it into "art". Anywho, I'm pretty tired from all this freeflowing creativity so I think I'm going to go to bed, but not before I post these pictures so Star can instantly see and comment on them. She's crazy with the omnipresence these days.

Mmmmm... jagged bits of pottery from a plant pot I scavenged from Goodwill.

The Best Day Ever

Today we went to a mosaic workshop and a leather workshop.

Today also turned out to be one of the best days I've ever had.

Mosaic is a craft/art that has been around since the Greeks and was popular in the Renaissance and Middle ages in Florence. In this case mosaic involves cutting stone and laying it down so that the pieces are flush with each other. I would call it more inlay, but whatever. The process and end result is absolutely amazing (I know I use this word alot, but this is one of the few times it's not an overstatement. I'm in kind of a "never cry wolf" situation with this post because I can't think of a better, more impressive word for this experience...so "amazing" it is). The majority of time is spent finding the perfect color within the blocks of stone for whatever piece you're trying to recreate. It's sort of like trying to re-create a picture using pieces torn from magazines. It takes relatively little time to tear the pieces out and glue them down, it's the search for the absolute perfect color match that is so time consuming. The smaller pieces in the shop (about 5 x 4 inches) were about 5,000 euros (which is even more in U.S.D.). Only 20 people in all of Florence know how to make this kind of mosaic today... it's a dying craft like so many other crafts. The workshops where you can go see artists practicing their craft are few and far between, but when you can stumble on someone making/restoring picture frames, or hammering at chandeliers, it's like stepping back into the Renaissance. The tools are the same (not just the design, but the actual tools may be ones that were made five hundred years ago) and the process is exactly the same.

The leather workshop was the same in that it consisted of a single man in his late forties. It didn't look like he had any apprentices or anyone to pass his craft on to. His grandfather opened the shop in 1921 and his father passed it on to him. This shop had been in his family for three generations and he seemed to be the last one. He made boxes made entire out of leather. The process involved twenty days of soaking, stretching, shaping and coaxing the leather into the shape of a box, or card holder or eyeglasses case. Each piece was hand made and each piece had a deep glow to it. The reds or browns or deep blacks seem to absorb and hold the light just under the surface of it's polished surface. Everything seemed to be alive. He had leather shavings in his hair, and used tools that had no equivalent name in English or Italian. These tools were his grandfathers, carried to Italy from the Netherlands along with the techniques for making these beautiful boxes.

We met Tanya (one of our frequent tour guides through AIFS) in San Lorenzo's piazza at 4.

San Lorenzo.

It occur ed to me that I hadn't taken any pictures of this church yet, and it's such a major landmark and so close to the school and house that it would be ridiculous not to.

Problem solved.
The Dante statue in San Lorenzo.

A table top. This took ten years to create in the workshop. Every piece is stone and all of it is naturally occurring stone.
I just want to touch this flower it looks so real. All stone.
Detail on the tulip. All of the color you see is naturally occurring in the piece of rock. This is the part of the mosaic process that takes the longest. The cutting, arranging and drawing are nothing compared to the amount of time these artists spend picking out the exact shade and gradation in the stone they want.
This is just a piece of rock. It's called a "landscape rock" because this type of rock naturally forms what looks like a landscape in its cross section. Nature is more amazing than anything man could dream up.
This is a more modern piece, the colors are gorgeous and the amount of work that went into this piece is equally impressive.

The "apprentice" (a thirty-forty year old guy) was working on this piece. The face on the left is the print out/reference picture and the face on the right is what he's created out of stone. Gorgeous.
The stone is cut with a piece of wire on a wooden frame. The wire is just a simple piece of wire... no teeth or any ability to cut on its own. Instead a mixture of water and abrasive is constantly poured on the backside by hand. The abrasive is the only thing that's cutting the stone and the wooden part of the saw is about two or three feet long so the sawing action is impressive.
Reminds me of Escher. All of the three dimensional qualities are with different pieces of stone. Simple but insanely difficult to do.
I liked this chair. So, I took a picture of it.

This was my favorite mosaic. It was based on a painting in France in the Louvre. The colors and shading was absolutely mind blowing. It looked like a painting and it was hard to wrap your brain around the fact that it was made of stone with absolutely no paint or touching up. Everything was just using pieces of stone selected for their color.
One of the two men who work in the shop sketching out a theme for a new piece.
This is a Greek mosaic made of glass. It was about and inch square or so. Infinitely tiny and mind boggling.
Cynthia bought one of the mosaics of grapes. It was beautiful, just don't even THINK about asking how much it was. This is a picture of Cynthia, her new purchase and the man who made it.
From the mosaic workshop we went for hot chocolate. Now these cups of heaven don't deserve to be put in the same category as that stuff we get from mixing powder and hot water together in the U.S. This was essentially a melted chocolate bar in a cup. It made the rest of the night feel like Christmas when you go to look at the lights on houses, cradling your cup of hot cocoa. The air was crisp and my glasses were fogging up from a combination of the steam from the chocolate and my breath. All of the shops looked extra special in the afterglow of creativity.