Monday, July 16, 2007

On Boredom

It's been slow going on my Venetian piece. My excuse is that my friend Margaret and I are working hard on putting together the New England Mosaic Exhibition which will take place in September. Our selection committee finished its work and we just notified the artists who will be in the show. (That was fun.) I also notified the artists who didn't make it. (That wasn't fun.)

I'll ramble on about the selection process in a later post. For now, back to Venice.

It's been slow going on my Venetian piece. (I said that already.) I think I'm bored. It's pleasing to see how the mosaic is turning out, but laying the stones for the sky in a random pattern is monotonous. I envy painters who lay down color with a few swoops and swishes of a brush. We mosaic artists must lovingly touch every single piece. Perhaps that is what sets mosaic apart from most other art forms. Margaret made this observation. We touch everything. There's no instrument (like a brush or a chisel) between us and our art.

It's a nice idea, but it doesn't get pieces glued to a substrate any faster - nor does jabbering on a blog.

I can't imagine what it's like to do a monotonous part of large mosaic. That's why the top mosaic artists have their myrmidons to to this work.

(Myrmidon - Teresa Sullivan taught me that word. It's a person who executes without question or scruple a master's commands.)

Perhaps the best mosaic artists find ways to make solid color backgrounds interesting. Some of my favorite mosaics - like Lynne Chinn's Far Red - have so much life and drama in a fairly monochromatic spread of color.

But I'm not looking for drama. My goal is to achieve a sense of serenity where everything just blends together. I think the randomness and color blending achieve that.

Grout rivers in a groutless piece!

Say it isn't so, but it is. One danger of doing this type of work is the unintended creation of a straight line in what should be a patchwork of interlocking pieces. Here are two grout rivers.


I didn't notice them until I looked at the section I was working on from a distance. So I replaced a few pieces to break up the lines. Still, I may need to do more. Now that I know there was a line in those locations, I'll always see it regardless of how I change it.


I like looking at this piece in different light. There's a point in the evening when dusk starts turning into night; the design of St G. just fades away and the entire piece looks like a strange bumpy surface of nothing in particular.

Perhaps boredom isn't so boring after all.

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