Virginia Gardner - Rock Star

I just added Virginia Gardner to the growing list of Rock Stars in the Rock Star Gallery.

This piece is White Noon and includes an incredible array of materials, including buffalo teeth! Also, those little dots about a third of the way up the piece are Desert Roses.

If White Night dazzled you with its brightness, here's one of her most recent pieces, Earth 1. It, too, contains an assortment of materials including some of the turquoise slabs from Mosaic Rocks.

Virginia says that a workshop with Ilana Shafir & then all day with Emma Biggs at SAMA had a profound influence on her.

A while ago when I first got into mosaics, I frequently surfed the net looking for mosaic artists. One of the first I stumbled on was Virginia's site & I've been following the progression of her work as a mosaicist and artist over the last few years. It's fun to see how we grow and change as we explore different motifs and new materials.

Check out her website at http://virginiamosaics.com/

Sailing (Marcia Hinds)

One of the great joys I get from Mosaic Rocks is the opportunity to meet different artists from all over the country and world. Most are mosaic artists in the traditional sense; however, some have an entirely different orientation.

I love Marcia Hinds' work. She call her paintings "ethereal landscapes" which is a perfect description for the way she sees the world through her art. This woman is not afraid of color and uses it in a way which simply draws you into her work.

Of particular note to mosaic fans - some of her work are mixed media in which she incorporates some traditional and some not-so-traditional pieces of tesserae. This photo is her most recent piece called Sailing. It's definitely not mosaic - but some of her other mixed media pieces come right up to the line between mosaic and other art forms.

Check out her website at http://marciahinds.com/ - A few mixed media pieces are in her "acrylics" section but don't ignore the rest of her site, especially her pastels.

Light & Mood - part 2

This past week with the holiday in the middle threw me off schedule to update the blog. I did find a few hours to work on my Turner-esque piece with some interesting results.

My goal is to create a mosaic with marble in which colors blend with each other to create an impressionistic mood similar to what Turner did with oils and watercolors in his work. The subject is a silhouette San Giorgio Maggiore against the Venetian lagoon and sky. Here's the piece without the sky.

I wanted the water to be colorless. You know, that color on a foggy day or at a particular time of day in which water really has no discernable color - not gray, not white, definitely not blue. So I mixed some grays with white cararra marble - which is also not quite white and not quite gray.

San Giorgio and its surrounding buildings is made with a gray-green marble, separate enough to distinguish it from the water of the lagoon, but similar in tones to make it look ghostly. It's hard to tell where the water ends and the land begins. The tops of the bell tower and the dome progressively get lighter so that they will blend in with the sky.

I started on the sky yesterday using a mixture of light yellow and rose colored marble. The rose stones are close to the horizon representing a setting (or rising) sun. The rest of the sky will be yellow. Here's the result so far.

A side note about photography: Both of the previous pictures were taken at different times of the day. For the first, I placed the mosaic on a black background; the second was placed on a tan background. I cropped out the backgrounds in both. It's interesting to see the difference in the colors. The first has a lot of blue tones in the photograph. The second is more white & gray, closer to how the piece actually looks. Perhaps it's the time of day, perhaps it's the background on which the photo was taken, or perhaps the color changed in the photograph when the yellow was added.

I like the ghostly effect. The piece is really interesting to look at from a distance. Close up is another story. Here's how I am placing the pieces:

Nothing flat here. Each piece is a different height, randomly set. This creates an interesting texture for the piece, but it also increases the exposed surface area of the marble. Not only are you seeing in the tops of the stones, you're also seeing the sides. This creates more color - and more shadow which perhaps confuses our eyes, making them see a blur of color instead of individual stones.

Mosaic Rocks! Summer Clearance - continued

This week some of our pyrite suns and polished ammonites are looking to be adopted and hoping to find a place in a great mosaic. The suns aren't the most glamorous, but they are fun and unusual. The ammonites are fairly small (about 1-2" across) and do sit flat, although they are thicker than most tesserae with their ends thicker than the spiral section.

You can see the suns which are on sale here and the ammonites here.

The Dance (Julie Dilling)

I am now the proud owner of Julie Dilling's The Dance. It's difficult to photograph this piece so that you can see the red background with the slightly raised slivers of stained glass that make up the grasses - but it's true beauty is revealed when light comes from behind.

Here's what Julie says about the mosaic:

The background is L'Opio. The grass is stained glass cut in 3/8, then cut in 1/3 and laid on its side. The edge are seed beads.

My inspiration came from a recent scuba trip to Indonesia. Most of the coral and sponges were reds and oranges - hence the red background. In the shallow areas were the turtle grasses that seem to dance in the current with the sunlight glittering on them. That's why I wanted the grass to be transparent. I have had "The Dance" sitting in the window at my house so the sun made the grasses sparkle.

Julie is a co-owner of Tesserae Mosaic Studio in Plano, Texas.

Mosaic Rocks! Summer Clearance

We plan to clean up the rock pile around here to make way for some new things which will be coming in the fall. So we just added a Clearance section to our website.

We love books, and we especially love mosaic books. But who can possibly compete with places like Amazon? This week we're clearing out our stock of books by offering them at a 50% discount - lower than Amazon's prices!!!!


We also have quite a few copies of Mosaic Art 2005 CD, so we're putting them on sale just for the summer at a great price.

Each week we will add something new to the website's clearance section. Check back to see what's new.

Mosaic Rocks! rocks find a home

We love to see our rocks find a home in a mosaic, and (of course) Sophie never fails to showcase rocks in such creative ways. This "mini mosaic" has our new Sodalite stones, red calcite, and an aragonite cluster.

Send us photos of your latest mosaics using our stones & we'll showcase them on this blog.