Peony

This is another of the small pieces produced from shelving remnants - first in a series of "flower portraits." It's about 7 inches square. I experimented in this one with combining stained glass - in the bud, stem and leaves - with glazed ceramic tiles in the background. I think it gives a starker, yet effective, background, and shaping the tiles to follow the line of the rounded bud - the Italians call this "andamento" - makes it seem to jump off the page. I plan a series of these, and a local gallery has expressed interest in showing them. 

My inspiration for the flowers was looking through a stack of drawings I did many years ago when I was on a watercolor kick. In college I had concentrated in Drawing, so in a lot of works I combined pure line with partial bursts of intense color, in either colored pencil or paint. This is the peony sketch that inspired the mosaic.