Mosaics Restoration in Italy

A wonderful website and daily email has been introduced to me by my dear friend and ardent supporter, Peggy Corrao.  When you sign up for the daily email, a treat arrives in your 'in' box each morning with something wonderful from Italy.  Today's email is a short article about an incredible mosaic restoration project currently taking place at a Villa in Sicily.  Click on the link below for the article and more pictures. 

Link to Italian Notebook Website

The New Bermuda

I created this piece using Italian and Mexican smalti.  The Italian smalti are the black and gold pieces, the Mexican smalti are the white pieces in the background.  I was experimenting at the time with creating depth and texture simply by the way the tile was cut and how/where it was laid.  I am so proud of how the hair turned out, the curls of the Queen's hair are created solely by the cut of the tile and their placement.  Using the same tile, I created the outline of her face, the eye, the profile of the nose and the mouth. Traditionally, color is relied upon to create these distinctions.  Suffice to say, this was a very difficult piece to create.

At the time I created this piece, Bermuda was undergoing some political and social changes that I wanted to address in my artwork.  The message I was trying to portray here is that our Premier at the time was not going to be happy until everyone, including the Queen, was Black.  His tagline on everything was 'The New Bermuda'.  Sadly, this Premier did not address the needs/concerns of the balance of the population of Bermuda.  A leader should be concerned with his/her entire constituancy. 

This piece was also recently re-photographed.  I am delighted with the photographer's ability to capture the details of this piece, the parts that to me, make it so enjoyable. 

Yummi Tribe Woman

I am so happy that I found a photographer in Carbondale who has the right indoor lights to photograph my mosaics up close and personal!  I have tried repeatedly to photograph this piece under different settings.  I struggled with light reflecting off the glass, whether it was flash or sunlight.  I think they did a great job and have fallen in love with this piece all over again!

Sneak Preview to my latest newsletter, coming out this week....

http://play.goldmail.com/0h5bgc9vu03y

Miss Charlston

Miss Charlston

I have a friend who recently told me a story.  The gist of the story was about how we can be so close to something happening, even danger, and have it only skirt us.  She shared about how her grandmother was passing through her dining room and just as she had cleared where the china cabinet was, it fell over onto the floor without warning; missing the grandmother by only a few inches.  While I was relieved to hear that the grandmother was unharmed, my next question was what had she done with the broken china!?! 

We are staying with friends in upstate NY and our hostess shared about how she had tripped in the butler's pantry and had broken 5 plates, beautiful ivory with a dark green ivy trim.  I have the perfect green bead that would have looked lovely with the ivy on the trim.  Sadly, they threw the broken plates away. 

I am currently working on 2 sculptures as a commission from a collector who is using her mother's china to create the sculptures.  While it is a beautiful china, the collector doesn't use it and wants to repurpose the pieces into a beautiful sculpture to remember her mother.  How wonderful.

Miss Charlston was created to use simply 3 broken plates my mother found at great store in Ft. Worth, Dishes from the Past.  They have just about every conceivable pattern of china and act as a replacement service.  The best part of the store, in the very back corner, is a 'broken shelf'.  All the plates on the shelf have been damaged in some way.  I scored 10 plates there on my last visit. 

The moral to the story- don't throw your broken plates away!  Send them to me!! 

Inspriation in London....

We spent a great weekend in London.  We enjoyed Kensington Palace- sadly, Princess Diana's dresses have been moved to the Fashion Museum in Bath.  We saw a wonderful exhibit of Grace Kelly's clothes at the Victoria and Albert Museum- I loved it and have many new ideas for dresses.  As we were walking towards Harrods, we passed the window displays for Harvey Nichols.  These photos are from the window displays.  The first one is a close up of a very large dress made of clothes pins.  Again, is it mosaic or collage?  The second grouping is a tree made of pencils.  I have also shown it up close so you can see the detail of the pencils and how a simple thing like a pencil can be divided into points, erasers etc. to create different images. What I love about this kind of art and what I do, it inspires people to view things in a new way, hopefully to look at your world in a new way. 

 

Weekend in NYC- influences abound!

I have just spent a long weekend in NYC with my husband.  We have taken the opportunity to visit several NY landmarks and to act like tourists- even though both of us have lived in the city at one time or another.  Travel is so refreshing and important, I was a flight attendant as a young adult and truly enjoy experiencing new things, cultures and influences.  The first exhibit that we saw was the King Tut exhibit created by National Geographic.  While I thought the exhibit was a little lacking for the ticket price, I enjoyed seeing the intricate details given to even the smallest of items for the pharoahs, such dedication by the artisans of the time.

Influences were everywhere, this is in a store window for the new book store at Bloomingdales.  The dress is made of advertising pages from magazines.

This is a fabulous art structure/sculpture on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum- a mosaic of bamboo!

A large mosaic portrait at the Metropolitan Museum.

We also saw a great exhibit titled 'American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity', you can definately expect to see numerous dresses in my 'Fall Collection' directly related to this exhibit at the Met.

And I had to throw this in, while I didn't see it this weekend in NY, I thought it appropriate for this blog entry!  Is it mosaic or collage!?!

My friend and mentor, Gabriella Brunner, once told me to always keep my eyes open, you never know when inspiration or objects will present themselves.