Mosaic Monday: Art from the Heart



Art from the Heart, image mosaic by Anna Lear/The Laughing Raven;
individual pieces by various artists as noted

Okay, so maybe I'm not a fan of Valentine's Day, but I love hearts! For this week's Mosaic Monday (a day late again...) I'm showcasing hearts in several media... well, mostly glass, I guess, which isn't a surprise because I love glass almost as much as I love hearts. Commonly used to represent love, passion, and strong emotions in general, the heart symbol is thought to have evolved from pre-Christian depictions of leaves that over time evolved into the current shape and became associated not only with romantic love but also passion of all sorts, including religious passion. A more recent (I think) trend is hearts with wings, which I especially love because they seem to say, set your passions free and beautiful things will happen. I bid you all a sparkling day.

Leafing Out

Summer is in full swing, and out here in the Great Southwest the summer storms are gearing up, right on time. We call them "the monsoons," but I'm sure they don't compare to real Asian monsoons. They do, however, bring us much-needed rain and light up the parched earth with green and all the other colors of the rainbow. Inspired by today's rain I made these earrings (and a matching necklace, a simple bolo-style with a front-closing toggle clasp) of oxidized brass and Swarovski crystals. I plan to take them along with other recent pieces on a gallery-scouting road trip soon.

Let's do a leaf theme today, shall we? Okay, so at right is a mosaic I made (and showed here) last fall, my second or third one ever; this one is in a gallery in Albuquerque, I think, and I'd like to do a much larger, more ambitious one someday... this fall, perhaps? And below is a photo I took about two weeks ago in the mountains above Magdalena of a young oak just starting to leaf out. I was surprised to see how red and even almost purple the new leaves were; they'll green up as they go, then all turn yellow, red, and bronze again in autumn. I'll be back then for sure to see that gorgeous show...

Young gambel oak (Quercus gambelii), Patterson Canyon, NM, June 2010

Someday Is Now

So I broke up "Black" after all; it just didn't work for me -- no surprise there given how personal the piece was. This piece is the former upper half; I grouted it Sunday and will finish the edges some time this week, perhaps with a bit more ornamentation than usual. The "left-behind" black heart remains unfinished for now as I finish coursework (the quarter ends this week) and continue dealing with court BS that will, I hope, be ending soon. I am ending it, in fact, because it is destroying my life and my soul and disrupting my children's lives, too, and nothing is worth that. Someday is, indeed, right now, and now is all I have.

One World, One Heart 2010: Thanks for a great ride, everyone!!

First order of business: I have picked (with a random number generator) and emailed the two winners for the One World One Heart 2010:

Deborah, of Comfort Joy Designs; and Kim, of Queen of Arts!

Congratulations to the winners -- I so wish I could send a pair to everyone who commented! Thank you all for visiting my blog and for your kind words; it is wonderful to "meet" you all, and I'm really enjoying reading your blogs, too! I was away at a seminar last week and didn't have time to visit your blogs then, but I'll pick up where I left off so I can see more of the awesome things you all do. I am just so amazed at all the creativity out there and love seeing everyone's creations, so keep at it and inspire us!

Now that I'm home I want to get back to mosaics, and I feel the jewelry mojo stirring, too... but I'm way behind in my coursework and the studio is an unholy mess. And so what did I do first thing this morning? Started making letter tiles, of course! These are for the flying heart part of what was formerly "Black" -- the upper half, which is now its own mosaic. I figure I can afford a little creative time because a heavy obligation requiring a trip to ABQ for the day was cancelled... sounds reasonable, right? I can clean up and do coursework and laundry while these bake, then while the paint dries, then while the adhesive attaching them to the mosaic dries, then while the grout for the whole piece dries. I figure I have a lot of creative time to catch up on, and my seminar (the second clinical skills residency for my marital/family therapy program) was so intense that this is the perfect way to both unwind and begin to mentally integrate everything I learned.

Yeah, that's the ticket... ;-) Happy creating, everyone!

A Valentine for You

May your heart soar today, whether you're flying solo, with your most special person, or with your whole flock.

I was away last week, attending a clinical skills seminar for school in Charlotte, NC; it was awesome but exhausting and has put me behind in everything. I will, however, select TWO winners for the One World, One Heart 2010 challenge today and announce the winners tomorrow. Both will receive a pair of the beautiful bird earrings pictured in my earlier entry -- I wish I had more to give away, and I thank you all so much for visiting and leaving all the kind compliments.

Coursework and kids will be consuming my attention and energy for the time being; I am starving for some creative time but might have to be content with cleaning up my studio for now, till I can clear some more mental as well as physical space to begin creating again. After having to fly through Dallas on Thursday during their record-breaking snowfall (HUGE kudos to American Airlines and DFW airport for even getting us in and out of there), I am most pleased to have come home to 50-degree sunshine here in the Land of Enchantment. Which makes me think gardening can't be too far away....

"Broken Hearts Bear Beauty"

This mosaic is officially finished... as long as it's out of my house, I can't mess with it anymore. I took it up to ABQ yesterday, to my friend Paula's gallery for her February Peace and Love show, and although it's for sale I put a fairly ridiculously high price on it because I don't *really* want to sell it. Not only is it personal but it represents a lot of fun experimentation with various composition issues and mixed media. In addition to the red glass and the salvaged broken mirror, this piece has my own handmade polymer clay tiles (the hand-lettered word tiles and the wings), many different shapes and sizes of glass and coral beads, and found objects including an old metal heart locket, a broken silver milagro, and a fractured mother-of-pearl heart cabochon. I especially love the beaded groutlines, and how the smaller red seed beads (in the groutlines around the heart's edges) look a lot like red blood cells... I'll definitely be doing that again in another piece down the road.

My recent posts might give the impression that I'm only doing mosaics these days... and except for making a few more brass birds-bearing-hearts earrings, this is pretty much true. With my gallery now closed and two of the three other galleries currently showing my jewelry closed through February, I won't need new stock for a while. I've been planning to follow up on a contact in Taos but keep getting delayed because of our El Nino-fueled winter storms. And... although I love making jewelry, I've been wanting more of a creative challenge lately. Mosaic work definitely offers that because most of the time I don't quite know what I'm doing, just what I want to do, and the gap between my imagination and my skills motivates me to stretch and grow. A dear friend also suggested I'm working out some issues in my art, and what better medium to do so than broken glass....

Black, redux... Still not working for me, so now what?

Thanks to Photoshop, I can play around with this image to see what might work better, so today I thought, what if I just cut out the piece's problematic midsection? Keep in mind that the revised image on the right is "larger".... Hmm. I'm still not liking it; I'm wondering if I should make the black heart smaller overall, and/or create more perspective where I intermingle the black with the "sky" both directionally and in terms of relative size of the pieces.

Another idea that is quickly taking root: split the two pieces entirely -- literally cut it in half (again, good thing I don't glue till I'm happy with the composition). So then I would do one mosaic of the black heart (probably narrower side to side, and perhaps tilted and "scattered" a bit more) and a separate one of the winged heart, also on a narrower background, and hang them sort-of together, just close enough that they're thematically connected, but the separateness would emphasize that that winged heart is gone, truly and for good now, so... Hmm. No wonder the piece isn't working in one confined space.... (No, it is NOT representative. NOT. At all. In any way.)

This one is really challenging me... and I love that.

Waiting for Spring: Sketches for a New Mosaic Series

I didn't actually handle any glass today; hanging out with the kids and taking care of two short assignments for school took priority, and three gashes in my fingers from last week still need some healing time. But I did stick to my promise to be actively creative every day this year, today sketching out a series of smallish (maybe 4x6 or 5x8) tiles I'd like to make showing early spring flowers of my childhood.

Having grown up in the east I well remember the surprise of snowdrops and crocuses in the earliest, often snowy days of March, followed by the cascading explosion of pink on our huge weeping cherry tree, the delicate white and pink dogwood blossoms, cheery yellow daffodils (always right around my birthday), and heavenly-fragrant hyacinths. I'll probably also do one of tulips, and maybe one of the mayapples and hellebores that grew in our woods... so many beautiful flowers, and I do miss them so.

I'll wait to start on this series till I return from Charlotte (my 2nd and final week-long clinical skills residency for school) on Feb. 11. In the meantime I'll be taking my recently finished projects up to Albuquerque next Monday for my friend Paula's "Peace and Love" show; five hearts are finished, and "Black" may or may not be ready by then depending on whether I can fix the huge composition problems plaguing its midsection.

When I'm working on, planning, or even just thinking about my mosaics, I feel at peace. I guess that's why I haven't wanted to do anything else lately; maybe I should figure out how to extend that peace into other pursuits, especially those I can't very well push aside, like school....

Black (in progress)

I sketched this mosaic out a few weeks ago and am still messing around with the composition (I inadvertently composed in halves rather than following the sacred rule of thirds and am diligently trying to correct that). I'm not happy with it yet, but lucky for me I rarely start adhering pieces till I'm essentially finished composing. It's quite large for me -- 12 by 15 inches -- and "illustrates" a song I can't get out of my head:

...And now my bitter hands
cradle broken glass
of what was everything
All the pictures have
all been washed in black
tattooed everything
All the love gone bad
turned my world to black
...I know someday you'll have a beautiful life
I know you'll be a star
in somebody else's sky...
(Pearl Jam, "Black")

The black is actually very dark purple glass; I used its smooth side for the foreground heart and bumpy matte side for its background to keep the tone consistently dark but somehow set the heart apart. Maybe that heart should be more "falling apart" or something; it looks too "composed," or something.

The small red heart flying off into the brightening sky isn't clearly visible here (it's still covered by the contact paper I compose on and use to hold it together while moving it around) but is composed of bright mirror-finish glass; I made the wings using polymer clay and "champagne sparkle" acrylic paint. That heart (the one escaping the darkness) would be me, by the way, if this piece were at all representative...

Fine-tuning

Okay, NOW this piece is done, except for cleaning every last bit of glue and crud off the glass, gluing back in the grout beads that popped out during cleaning, and painting the edges and back. I made a bunch of polymer clay wings the other day and tried a pair out on this piece just to see how they might look, and that's when I realized the piece was really done. (Well, I painted the wings a crystal champagne white, glued them on, then decided the composition was truly done.)

(For now.)

Coursework -- my second-to-last quarter -- has cut way into my mosaic time, but I've still finished a few more pieces and am slowly composing one that I call "Black." It's much larger, both because I'm tired of trying to piece and glue tiny shards and because the idea needs more room to translate into glass.... Why couldn't I pick something easier, like drawing or painting? Easier on the hands, anyway; I'm on my third box of Band-Aid Tough Strips in as many months. Of course, my trip to the Socorro ER for a splinter in my eye on Monday came not from shattering glass (I wear goggles, always) but from something so mundane as splitting and stacking firewood. So I guess by comparison glass mosaics are safer....

More Finished: Sacred Heart Rosary

This piece continues to evolve; I knew it wasn't done but couldn't figure out what it needed... then I thought of the rosary. I actually made a rosary bracelet, which (legend has it) evolved in late-1500s British-controlled Ireland as a smaller form of rosary that could be easily concealed in a sleeve so as to avoid persecution. So, that's that for now....

"Art" or Insanity? Probably a Bit of Both

I think I like the beaded grout so far... it's a bit busy, but I believe it will cohere the piece once it's all in. I won't have time to work on this today, which is a good thing because it needs to sit for a while longer till I decide for sure. I have the impulse to start cleaning it, but of course that should wait till all the gluing is done. I do love the focal piece (locket with hearts and milagro); it's composed of castoffs, the reclaiming of which paradoxically makes them seem more precious. So, maybe this piece is a bit artistic, and a bit insane, and in any case I'm having fun making it. Well, except for the part where the Superglue sticks to my fingers and rips all the freshly-placed beads right back out of their grout space. Current workaround: use the WD-40-greased tip of my bead-reamer (a long, thin metal tool) to slide the beads back into place. I think as much creativity goes into solving problems like this as goes into composition... which is cool with me.

Another (Re-)Pieced Heart, and an Experiment at the Crossroads

Here's another more-or-less finished mosaic, a 5 x 5 inch square that could serve as a keyholder or small jewelry display thanks to the brass rosettes that are, in fact, upholstery tacks. I like the colors here a lot: atypical for a heart and cooler than the usual Valentine. This hastily-composed photo doesn't entirely show it, but the brownish glass is all mirror-coated, which adds nicely to the contrast. As with my other pieces I still need to figure out a consistent way to finish the edges; I guess paint would be okay, but I dream of the day I can put a finished frame around my creations. I will NOT take up yet another hobby, however... I think I need to befriend a woodworker who can also make me more of the self-framed wooden crosses that work so well for mosaics. Maybe I'm ready for a partnership... of sorts....

I'm now beading the grout of my bright red broken-heart piece -- yes, beading the grout, with African trade beads, seed beads, and Super Glue. The whole piece has been an experiment, so why not? The colorful trade beads went quickly but now that I'm beading the outer grout lines with size 15 (that's tiny) seed beads the process is tedious, to say the least, and will become far more tedious if I decide I hate it and have to scrape it all out. I did make new word tiles using polymer clay, alphabet stamps, acrylic paint, and shimmery pigment powder old eyeshadow, and am much happier with them. Tonight I also finished the focal piece using the old locket and lampwork bead shown here along with a fractured mother-of-pearl heart cabochon and broken hand milagro... you'll have to wait to see that treasure in its finished state. This piece is now far more complicated than the earlier progress shot at left shows and might be bordering on insanity at this point; I guess I'll sleep on it and see what I think tomorrow.

Finished? Not Sure

I started my Winter Quarter of coursework today and am sad to be losing my after-hours mosaic time. One of my Facebook friends has vowed to be creative every day, and I can commit to that, too, even if I just spend a half hour making or painting some Sculpey tiles for a new mosaic. Today I sort of finished this frame... I wonder if it needs a few small embellishments to complement the pretty glass dragonfly tile on the left, so I'll sit with it and let it tell me whether it's done.

Up next: more frames, maybe, and some little birdhouses: I hit the local thrift store last week and walked out with 10 cool things to mosaic on (some old frames and a simple wooden birdhouse) and with (a few pieces of opalized glass that used to be saucers) -- for all of $1.00 because it was Dime Day. I also have that red heart ready to embellish (rivers of beads in the grout lines) and another heart project in the works for which I probably won't start breaking more glass till next week when I am settled into a routine with coursework again. Oh, and I decided to make a rosary to wrap around that Sacred Heart cross I started last summer and just finished last week, except that I kept feeling like it's not Finished, so now I need to find a brass or gold-tone crucifix and rosary center. It's either a handmade (of course) rosary or some barbed wire... that might be cool.... First, though, duty calls. *Sigh.*

Ready for Grouting

I started these two pieces several weeks apart and finished them one day apart. The heart frame took much longer because I had to figure out how to paint the frame to make the pale pink non-opaque tiles look good. The Pepto Bismol pink I tried first was not the way to go, nor was metallic purple, so I just kept brushing and sponging on more paint in the pink-purple part of the spectrum till I got something I was okay with. I don't love it, but it worked well enough for me to finish this piece. After grouting it I'll add maybe two more small embellishments, perhaps a dragonfly and a flower, to balance the lovely Creekmore-Durham glass tile on the left side of the frame. (One note: the tiles are not quite as crooked as they look; that's an artifact of the camera angle.)

The dragonfly piece above also uses a focal glass tile from Creekmore-Durham and took several part-days to piece because cutting and fitting the small glass pieces (the whole tile is just 5 by 6 inches) is much harder than working with large pieces. I also changed my mind on the blue for the "sky" and had to chip out a few glued-in pieces before proceeding; one hung on tenaciously and I couldn't even chip it out with a hammer and screwdriver (I passed on using the drill... flying glass shards and no medical insurance don't mix well), so I left the fragment and will accept an imperfect piece... ;-) I'll paint the little letter tiles (I made those! they read "you can fly") after grouting; I learned the hard way with another piece last week that grout is very hard on acrylic paint. Play, learn, and play some more...

Controlled Chaos

Above is a shot of my work table -- one of three work tables, in fact; I have this one (from the gallery, which is closed for good now), my jewelry table (now jewelry/mosaic table) just to its left, and the glass sorting and grouting table over by the wall, which is actually the dining room table and is covered with two sturdy plastic covers. Yes, I've spread out a bit, as is my habit (don't worry, Mom, I'll compact it all before you guys come out to visit)... I tidied this table up a bit before snapping this picture, which shows six of about ten projects I have in progress. The red heart on the left has been in progress for a week and had to sit for a while as I figured out whether to keep the rather imperfect word tiles I'd made or make new ones. I'm leaning toward making new ones (I'm discovering my inner perfectionist these days, to my bemused surprise) mainly because the copper wash under the glass doesn't work with the mirror and should probably be silver instead. I seem to be experimenting, always, and although I sometimes take a while to figure out how to solve a problem, I love the learning and playing involved.

I also love how mosaic work fits my "multi-tasking" style perfectly because when I get stuck on or frustrated with one project or process, I can move to another piece in a different stage. Last night I got tired of how the blue glass I'm using for the piece in the upper middle of the picture was splintering rather than breaking cleanly, so I grouted. I'm finding glass cutting particularly baffling these days, perhaps because I'm using rougher-than-usual artisan stained glass panels that do not break cleanly at all. This morning I cut a much easier batch of glass for the "black heart" (shown above in the bottom center of the picture) for a piece that's been floating in my head for a few days now, and as the picture at right shows I've made more progress, perhaps enough to start piecing it on Hardibacker tonight.

A Heart On the Wing

I call this small piece my New Year's hope mosaic. I pieced the heart on New Year's Eve and kept having thoughts of piecing together my own heart from these shards of beautiful stained glass. The "sky" came together the next day -- New Year's Day -- and after grouting the piece last night, I added the hand-wrought brass wire hook and tiny brass bird this morning. I think it's finished, though I am thinking about how to finish the edges (maybe paint; I'd love to do a wooden frame but am no kind of woodworker and don't really have the time to learn yet another skill). I might also need to seal the grout because it's a bit crumbly, and who knows, I might add a few more treasures to some of the larger grout spaces. I'll sit with it and see how it evolves; aside from first imagining a piece, my favorite part of the creative process is "living with" a piece and figuring out how to bring the real thing closer to my original vision for it.

I have several more pieces in progress, and just six days left to finish them before coursework descends on me again next week. Most of the pieces are small like this one (it measures just 4 by 6 inches), which seems manageable... It's strange to be creating so avidly just as my friends and I close our gallery...

Happy New Year!

I've finally been able to start back up with mosaics now that I'm on break from school, and although I'm struggling a bit with composition and technique (I never did take an art class in college), I'm learning a lot just by playing. These hearts are inspired by a quote from a strange and wise person who, last year, talked about surrendering to circumstances: "Let it break you open. You'll never know the beauty inside unless you do." He was right, and I feel like I'm finally living that truth.

Both are pieced from stained glass that I cut by hand, usually going more or less freeform with a mosaic glass cutter but sometimes using a pistol-grip glass cutter for a more precise shape. I pieced and glued the smaller heart last night after celebrating a quiet, fun New Year's Eve with my kids, and hope to finish both backgrounds and then clean the pieces tonight (the messy white stuff on the glass is residual glue; I use "Household Cement" now instead of mortar with the glass because it holds the pieces much better). The larger heart will have beads and other treasures in the "seams"; the smaller one will just be grouted, I think, though I may add some treasures to the background.

Stone + Fiber = Cool

I've been dabbling at Kumihimo (a traditional Japanese fiber art) for about six months now and love how it looks with stone. For this cord I used some exquisite hand-dyed silk that I found at the 2007 Albuquerque Fiber Arts Fiesta to make a 12-strand braid that perfectly matches this amazing chrysocolla stone given to me by Dean and Conne of Two Cranes. I have five or six other braids finished but have been kind of stumped about how to finish the ends for jewelry. The piece above shows one way: attach a button (this one is from Sara and David of Creekmore Durham Glass, from whom I also obtained the lovely pendant at right) and make a loop on the other end. I could also try more formal, finished end caps, but they can be expensive and so far I haven't found them entirely reliable. So, more exploration on that issue.

In other crafty news, the grouting of the cross piece in the last post did not go well; the very dark grout just muddied the whole piece. So I have to decide whether to scrape out the grout, or at least the top layer of it, and try a much lighter color. *Sigh.* I guess it's all part of the learning process. Maybe my bout this week with strep throat threw off my color judgment... or just tired me out.

And in other general news, my dear friend Evelyn is now on hospice care at home and will probably leave us soon. I know she's lived a full life and has had some peace in these past few years, but it's still way too soon. I love you, Evelyn, and will come say Goodbye today or tomorrow. Also, my father is in the hospital because he needs bypass surgery, which will happen next Monday or Tuesday; this was quite unexpected (for me, anyway); he has always been healthy. AND... my mom needs another round of chemotherapy; her cancer is back. DAMN. So I may not be updating here for a while.

Sacre Coeur!

This piece is now ready for grouting, after I glue back on three pieces that popped off during cleaning. (Is Versa-Flex less effective in a dry climate, or am I mixing it wrong, or what? Oh, and I just realized this pic shows two of the three loose pieces misplaced.) I think I'll use dark gray grout with shimmery black acrylic paint for a darker and slightly lustrous tint, and I'll probably re-paint the frame, too, probably a shimmery navy blue. I work the gallery tomorrow and will be able to grout this and a few other pieces, because THE KIDS ARE BACK IN SCHOOL!!! And both kids are now on full-day schedules, which gives me more daylight time for my own schoolwork and a bit more leeway for projects like this one.