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.

First Hello

Today is Sunday, the cat is napping and it's too hot to work in the garden, so here I am. This is the first post for a blog about mosaic and art and anything else that I feel like writing about.

My thanks to my friend Elizabeth St. Hilaire Nelson, a wonderful collage artist, who inspired me to start blogging! Her blog is called "Paper Paintings". I love her use of vibrant colors, and she creates lots of birds in her paintings, which is a subject I love as well.

The pictures show a sculpture that I've just started. The form was given to me by another friend, Margo Barber, the founder of the Manatee Mosaic Group, which I joined a few months ago. We spend a very happy day once a month inspiring each other with our current mosaic projects at a lovely retreat center in the woods. Margo brought me this duck form after hearing me tell how I like to work on 3-D mosaics. I decided that if I were a plain duck, I'd like to be decorated with something really fancy, so I've started mosaicking flamingoes all over it. I'm using pink glass tiles in 3 or 4 shades, cut into small pieces. The picture shows a start; I'll post more as I continue working on it.