Mosaicing ahead with a little detour...

This week I have again been working on several mosaic projects.  This is the one that I am working on presently.  It is a stained glass mosaic like the one on the heading of my blog.  I like the sparkliness of the glass and the brilliant colors.  

I also had an interruption in my projects with a request from my middle son.   He is involved with LARPing which is live action role playing and he had just finished a shield which needed a design on the front of it.  So he asked me to paint one for him and I did.  It was fun and I think it turned out well.

  There is not much in the artsy world that I don't like to do, draw, paint, decorate, garden, sew, build things, etc. etc, but I think of all of the mediums available to me,  mosaic work has become my favorite.  There is something about the act of placing piece after piece that is so meditative. Believe me the brain gets a good workout.

But for me there is more to it than that.  I can come close to the idea that I want to express...and taking broken pieces and making something beautiful speaks to me of redemption,  the possibility that all things can become new.  It also reminds me that each life I have contact with is not complete, but is gradually being put together into a work of art, and whether that work becomes beautiful or not remains to be seen.  And it also reminds me that we never have a whole picture, only parts of a whole, and so we shouldn't be too quick to judge based on what we see, because we can never see things completely clearly.

Sonia King, a mosaic artist that I greatly admire had this quote in her book and on her facebook page.

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic." - Anaïs Nin

So in many ways, the process of doing a mosaic is for me a search for truth. Because with every little piece I glue down I discover something else.  And when I apply the grout and wipe it away I see something that oftentimes surprises me and goes a little beyond the vision I started with.