I did these two mosaics — “Pulse” and “Fault Line” — in a mad sprint to the finish. I wanted to finish them quickly so I could drop them off, along with “Thaw” and “Harvest“, at The Studio : Boutique as we were passing through Carleton Place on our way to Kitchener for R’s brother’s wedding. So I banged these out over the course of two consecutive weekends, each one taking a few hours of concentrated work.
“Pulse” is made of marble subway tiles from the ReStore, as well as leftover smalti from “Punctuated Equilibrium” (just used on its side rather than standing on end). “Fault Line” used up all the rusty blue stone that I brought back from Pennsylvania (Booo! Wish I had more of that stuff!), and then some brick that had sheered off one of the houses on my block. Neither mosaic was the result of extensive planning — I let the pieces determine the path of the focal line of each mosaic, and then just built the rest from there. This is one of the things I love most about mosaics, just letting the tesserae take me on an adventure. It’s like reading a really good book, in that you’re always itching to turn the page, lay down the next tesserae, in order to find out what happens next.
3 Comments
Hi Julie! I love love love Harvest! And all actually. If you want any more Pennsylvania stone, I can send. I know you are trying to work with local…I’m out ALot and always picking up rocks. I’m serious. I have no idea what shipping costs but if you cant squelch the urge for crumbling sandstone or cool fossiley rocks, just say so.
also where’s the show in the south US? ~ Julia from Touchstone
Thanks Julia! Harvest and Fault Line are my 2 personal faves of the 4. Also, careful… I may just take you up on that offer of the stone! Funny, Rachel offered the same thing (and already sent some stones for me with a friend of hers who’s a mosaic artist from my hometown). I do like working local, but man, sometimes the stone around here is just so HARD. I was so spoiled that weekend with the sandstone…
[…] I had no idea where I was going to go after I finished that initial section. Would I switch directions and add in some horizonal(ish) lines? Have everything just radiate from that red stone? Introduce more focal points? And what about colours? Gah! Too much thinking. I just went with my gut, which was telling me: strip it down, keep it simple. So I just let everything keep running diagonally, but introduced some red at the top (because there were some red/white stones in my pile that I thought were quite beautiful) and black at the bottom, which is the stuff that came from Canada. [Side note: it was neat to feel the difference between the two kinds of stone when I was cutting them. The stuff from home was much harder and had a nice clean (and entirely satisfying) snap to it when it broke, whereas the sandstone was like butter.] There were some very jagged and irregular blue stones with a nice rusty orange-red that I really really wanted to incorporate, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t make it work. Anything I tried just felt forced. But fear not, I did bring them home with me (the only ones that made the journey back) and hopefully they’ll make their way into a future piece. […]